Hunting in Hell (42 page)

"He is … on an off-world."

Laufeyson's eyes widened in understanding.
 
"You mean-"

"Yes," she interrupted.
 
"He is somewhere
else
, somewhere he did not create."

The words buzzed in De la Roca's head.
 
There are worlds God did not create?
 
Then … are there other gods?

"How could you?
 
Anything could happen!
 
He could
die!
" Laufeyson's exclamation only made the buzzing louder.
 

"
I
didn't send Him there!
 
It was His own doing!"
 
De la Roca felt a lurching as the mademoiselle yelled, as if she was riding a horse that had suddenly changed directions.
 

The Mademoiselle looked at them all at once, her lip curled and her eyes spitting fire.
  
"He
ordered
me to leave, and I was still an angel.
 
I had
no choice
."

"Take us to him."
  
De la Roca's voice was unexpected.
 
Laufeyson and the Mademoiselle turned to stare at her with incredulity, while Alsvior pointedly stared at his feet.

"To an
off
-world?"
 
Laufeyson's jaw had dropped.
 
"Do you know how
dangerous
that is?"

"Why not?
 
Is it any more dangerous than an
on
world, now?
 
We have every single angel of Hell after us, bent on our deaths."
 
She wasn't sure what dangers an off-world presented, but she doubted there was a place on Earth or Hell that Golden and the other angels wouldn't find them.

The silence that followed was broken by Alsvior.
 
"But what do you expect us to do when we get there, De la Roca?"

"We talk to God."

"It's crazy," said the Mademoiselle.
 
"Besides, I can't.
 
I was ordered not to return."

"As an angel," agreed Laufeyson.

The Mademoiselle nodded, stopping dead as her eyes widened.
  
"Golden … he took my wings.
 
As a gift to Nemain, for her part in Cleopia."

At the mention of the name, De la Roca saw the lift of Alsvior's head.

What pain he must have felt, seeing her face every day.
 
De la Roca felt the first unsettled pangs of guilt.
 
Now is not the time.
 
She squared her shoulders and pursed her lips.
 
"So you can take us now?"

The Mademoiselle nodded.
 

"Then do it."
 
De la Roca patted her right side and blew out heavily.
 
"I just wish I had
Bluot.
"
 

Alsvior cleared his throat.
 
He pulled a sack from his sash, a little bag that he threw at De la Roca.
 
She caught it, surprised at the heft.
 
She opened the cinched mouth, and a familiar thrum reverberated through her body.

Her breath and hands shaking, she thrust her hand into the bag and shook it off, revealing
Bluot
in the dim light.
 
Instantly, her body was filled with the hot pulse of her gun, and the Thrysus stone in her belly thrummed in return.

"How … how did you get this?"

"I stole it."

"I don't understand."

"From the altar.
 
If I am interacting with the environment - picking something up, fighting, even putting food into my mouth - then I am no faster than one of you.
 
But if I am running, merely running-"

"You are uncatchable," answered Laufeyson.

Alsvior nodded.

"I stole it from the altar, as soon as I had the dagger.
 
It was but the work of a moment, and then I was running,
running
-" and his voice faded off with a smile.
 
De la Roca understood that smile.
 
It was the smile of true and pure bliss.

"Time's up," said the Mademoiselle, abruptly.
 
As if to give credence to her words, the world lurched again.
 
I can't hold us much longer."
 
She smiled, a grin that chilled De la Roca to her bones. "Since I'm the only one who can move us anyway, I've decided for us."

Before any of them could protest, the world faded away.

THIRTY-EIGHT

T
he world was no longer shrouded in darkness; instead, De la Roca could make out wide swatches of texture and color.
 
Yet the environment was misty, ethereal, somehow lacking full solidity.
 

De la Roca wiggled her fingers.
 
She could see through her palm to her leg, and through that even, to the purplish gray of some sort of plant matter below her.

For a moment, she wondered if she had died.
 
Was this what a ghost saw?

Did she even believe in ghosts?

Lending a disconcerting credence to that idea was the fact that she couldn't
feel
anything.
 
After a lifetime of being so intimately linked to the world around her, the lack of sensation made her heart beat harder.
 
Where was the ground, the wind?
 
She pressed her hands to her cheeks, but her skin didn't register the contact.
 
Whatever was broken here, it was in her, and not in the world.

Laufeyson and Alsvior stood in front of her, expressions of surprise on their faces as well.
 
She stared again at her palm, before registering its emptiness.

Bluot
, she thought.
 
It was in my hand, wasn't it?

The world around her bulged suddenly, and a tiny bubble popped into view.
 
It was like a viewfinder into how the world should have been, solid and real, and through it, she could see the clear image of a field of waving purple grass.

"Neat, isn't it?"
 
It was the Mademoiselle's voice, and De la Roca turned to look at her.
 
Yet the picture that she saw shocked her.
 
The Mademoiselle looked haggard, more dead than alive.
 
Her skin hung off of her bones and the dark circles under her eyes had deteriorated into
holes.

And she was holding
Bluot
in her hands
.

Jealousy suddenly leaped up through De la Roca.
 
She tried to lunge, but it felt like moving through molasses.

"I am sorry, you know.
 
You've been betrayed a lot and I've always wondered how much one
 
can take before losing it completely.
 
But the thing is, my survival depends on this gun.
 
I have a pretty good feeling, too, that you're not going to let me have it, so I really do apologize for what's next.

"Bluot," she said, "I call you."
 
She aimed the gun right at De la Roca.

Even from a distance, De la Roca felt the gun humming to life.
 
She leapt, the stickiness of the molasses world slowing her impossibly.
 
She saw Alsvior pass her.
 
He shifted, becoming visible, then invisible again, then visible, and right before he reached the Mademoiselle, De la Roca had a final thought.

Too late.

The muscles in the Mademoiselle's wrist flexed beautifully as she pulled the trigger.
 
There was a flash and an awful, extended roar, and De la Roca saw the bullet streak toward her, slow enough that she had time to feel a final acceptance enter her bones.

It was, after all, how the gun changed masters.
 
She had always known it would kill her someday.

She closed her eyes and waited for the end.

#

He had tackled the Mademoiselle, but it was already too late.

Alsvior, of course, had always known that trading De la Roca in meant that he might never get her back, but there were more important matters than the life or death of a single being - even a being he loved.
 
And his foremost motivation for the last three hundred years had been to find a way to kill Golden.

There were moments, lying together on the beach, where he was closest to turning it around, to changing his mind.

But he didn't.
 
His cowardice had held him back.

And then, the Mademoiselle had appeared.
 
Hard to believe he had been grateful.

THIRTY-NINE

T
he bullet flew towards De la Roca in slow motion.
 
Seconds before it slammed into her forehead, it arced its trajectory ever so slightly, whipping instead by her ear.
 
Had she been able to feel, she would have sensed the wind of its passing.
 
Instead, it was the sound, the barest of hums that made her eyes flick open to see a few stray hairs.

And then she saw the bullet again, only it was facing the wrong way,
going
the wrong way, and she understood.

Bluot chooses its own targets.
 
And today, it had not chosen her.

#

In the sticky-time of their bubble, the turn of the bullet was long, long enough for the Mademoiselle's expression of triumphant glee to turn to shock and then fear.
 
She rotated, her body turning in space, her leg stretching to start her run, and then the bullet slammed her in the back of the head.

The bubble popped.

FORTY

T
he Mademoiselle's burning corpse lay a short distance behind them, her forehead blown out by
Bluot's
bullet.
 
The fire had started swiftly, before they had a chance to examine the body.
 
De la Roca blew out, her breath fogging in the air.
 
She stretched her hands over the Mademoiselle's body and took a moment to warm them.

"I think it was a bubble, like before.
 
An in-between place."
 
Laufeyson's voice cut through a quiet previously only marred by the crackling of fire and the blowing of the wind.
 

He continued without prompting, working through the problem out loud.

"The being in-between worlds … it's an unnatural state.
 
The world had to right it.
 
The other bubble was dark and without features because it was exactly halfway, a point where the pull of each world is even.
 
It was a natural stopping point, in a way."

"The second time, we were closer to this world, close enough that we could even see some of the features."
 
Alsvior had not spoken since their arrival, and his voice sounded fuzzy and hollow.

De la Roca sighed.
 
"Like the grass."
 
Both alien and familiar, it was a deep purple, with blades almost as long as a finger.
 
She stared off at the plain and wondered how it survived the cold.
 
Small herds of grazing animals, similar to antelope, were clumped together in the distance, and the horizon was distorted by a craggy mountain range, the peaks capped with snow.

"When the Mademoiselle died, it broke the bubble and dumped us in the direction that the pull was the strongest."
 
Laufeyson was pointedly not making eye-contact with her or the method she used to warm her hands.
 

Hypocrite,
she thought,
I don't trust you either.

"Where is here?" asked Alsvior.
 
"I mean, how can you be sure we're on an off-world?"

She wanted to snort.
 
Could he really not feel the difference?
 
It was as if the very rhythm of time and the seasons had changed.
 
At a glance, this world was not so strange, but if you took your time, you noticed the differences.
 
Even now, she could not ignore the spicy scent of the grass or the odd, trumpeting calls of an animal she had never seen before.

Laufeyson was gentler in his answer.
 
"I tried to manifest a cigarette, but nothing happened."

Alsvior stood up and began to run.
 
He was fast, but not any faster than the rest of them.
 
He stopped and looked back, an expression of pain on his face.

No magic?
 
De la Roca shifted uneasily.
 
Her bruises felt as real and as deep as ever, no signs of accelerated healing.
 
The Thyrsus stone felt gone, her gut empty.
 
With a sudden fear, she reached down and picked up
Bluot
, trying to feel the thrum of its pulse, but there was nothing.
 
"I think
Bluot
is dead, too."