The Protect Her Box Set: Parts 7-9 (13 page)

CHAPTER FIVE –
RILEY

People always wonder if Hell is real and what it is like if it is. My first visit left me burned out and blackened. Bruno Proctor took my family away from me in the most painful and tortuous way. I would have gladly taken their place, but he wouldn’t let me. It was as if he was on some kind of personal vendetta to make sure that I suffered, and hearing their screams and watching them writhe in pain accomplished that mission. Some nights it was still hard for me to sleep.

But if Proctor thought that he broke me, he couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was because of him that I spent the last five years perfecting my craft and exploring every dark angle of my talents. Just because I was mortal didn’t make me weak. That was for damn sure.

Fortunately for me, there were no shortage of demons to experiment on through the course of my work. I knew that the self-righteous angels took offense to my methods, but I always got the job done. It hadn’t ever bothered me. I figured the world was a better place because there was one less demon to contend with in it when I sent them to the ether.

Occasionally, I ran across a human whose soul I figured was even blacker than that of a demon. Those fuckers deserved a one-way ticket to the ether. Child molesters, murderers, and any other bastard who reveled in inflicting pain on others didn’t find any mercy at my hands. I played judge, jury, and executioner, and I didn’t lose one iota of sleep over it. I straddled two worlds, and so the whole moral and ethical code was more than ambiguous when trying to cross between the two. Ultimately, I made up my own rules, and that was okay by me. Who was around that was going to make me do anything different? Who was in a position to play judge and jury on my actions?

There was a little voice in the back of my mind that occasionally surfaced. It would whisper that I had lost my way. It said if I didn’t change my ways, then I risked becoming someone no better than those I tortured and banished to the either. Because whether I was willing to admit it consciously or not, I found that I got a sick thrill out of the hunt and the interrogations. Without any bumpers or guideposts of morality around me, it was often possible to feel omniscient. That feeling was addictive as hell.

It was an unsettling feeling when I stepped out of that persona and remembered that I had once held myself to a far nobler purpose. It snuck up on me when I wasn’t paying attention. It was a part of me that I had never fully banished no matter how hard I tried.

It was that part of me that answered the call of Paige’s scream the night I found her being attacked by the Tiphon demon in the cemetery. I remembered emerging from the tomb after having just banished another demon to the ether. I knew that Calamata Island was showing signs of a demon infestation, and Paige’s scream was the signal that the creatures that were supposed to be invisible in the human world were on the prowl. They hunted and would take down anyone in their way.

My first instinct had been to help, not look the other way. Even after finding Paige, when I should have dropped her off to Sheriff Halpren, collected my fee and been on my way, I kept pressing forward to help her. She tried to shake me, and I wouldn’t let her. I had insisted that I was the only one who could help her. I was the only one who could save her. I got caught up in the idea that we were reincarnated souls of two extraordinary beings whose lives had been intertwined a thousand years ago. I bought into that line of bullshit hook, line, and sinker.

That small voice in the back of my mind had already started to question if I was overreacting, but I stuffed a sock in it. There was nothing normal about my life. Upholding certain values or traditions, like waiting years before making it official that you wanted to be with someone forever, seemed silly and unwise. I could possibly die at any moment. In fact, with the way I felt right now, it seemed clear that could be sooner rather than later.

It was as if a black cloud settled over my mind. The one good thing about it was that it distracted me from the fact that I had been effectively shut out the first time I had ever even come close to proposing to a woman. It figured that she was entirely noncommittal. I wasn’t really marriage material. It had been stupid of me to think I was. Marriage and the requisite two point five kids were for normal people. Paige and I weren’t normal. Not by a long shot.

Maybe that was why she turned me down. Without the relic, Paige was vulnerable to Eva’s possession. The idea that she would be able to use it against Eva to push back the Goddess’s foothold in this world had been a long shot from the get go. But it seemed like pretty much everything we did was a long shot. Proctor said that he didn’t want Eva to come back. It seemed like the easiest way to negate that threat was to kill Paige outright.

I barely registered when Paige and my mother left the room. I hadn’t been listening to whatever it was they were talking about anyway. Between my shock and hurt at Paige’s deflection and the rolling racks of physical pain that had begun to sweep my body, I was surprised that I had the ability to form any coherent thoughts at all. At least I did know the reason behind that.

About a year after I thought Proctor had killed my family, I found my way to a remote village in the Alps of Tibet. I sought a man who was the underworld’s foremost expert on pain management. His name was Herold Calvin. It took me a week and the payment of a small fortune in small bills to convince his handlers to let me talk to him. It took me another week of not-so-patient constant cajoling to get him to agree to take me on as a student. I spent another month there partaking in the most unusual teaching method I had ever experienced.

I felt another spasm of pain shoot up my side, and I let my mind close in on those memories.

“You flinched.” Herold’s voice held a distinct note of disappointment.

“I didn’t,” I said through clenched teeth. The knife that had so neatly sliced between the two vertebrae of my forearm disappeared in a flash of light. “Son of a bitch,” I gasped. I had worked with Herold long enough that I should have been prepared for the lace of white hot pain that drove up my arm. He used magic to ensure that his students didn’t bleed out during the lessons, but he also didn’t have a problem leaving behind a fresh remnant of the pain to keep you on your toes.

“You’re still blocking yourself,” Herold said with a sigh. He stood up from his seat across the room and moved to the fireplace. He took the poker from the side of the mantle and used it to jostle the dying embers of the fire.

I stiffened in my seat. I had both arms spread out on small tables on either side of my chair. My torso was bare. My feet were strapped tightly against the legs of the chair. Herold told me that he learned long ago that controlling flailing limbs was often one of the more difficult challenges that his students faced. It was also a safety measure. Although Herold kept a safe distance most of the time during the lessons, sometimes his lesson plans required a more ‘hands-on’ approach.

Herold Calvin had been one of those souls that spent most of his years as a human inflicting some of the most horrible pain on other human beings. He went to Hell, and then had some kind of epiphany about his life’s work. He finagled a ‘Get out of Hell’ free card and got spit back out into the human world as a demon. Except he decided to set-up shop teaching others how to mitigate the effects of torture and pain at the most extreme levels. When I decided to go up against Proctor again, that was the kind of skill I needed to have.

It was twisted when you thought about it. Herold had figured out a way to keep feeding his addiction, and people like me actually sought him out and paid him to do it. It was frighteningly brilliant, but based on the testimonials I had heard, also extremely effective. There was no one better to teach me. So while I loathed the bastard, I also needed him.

“I didn’t flinch,” I stubbornly repeated. We had been at it for almost three hours. While Herold had healed my wound every time, my arm still bore a blossoming bruise as a reminder of it. Herold said as long as there weren’t any visible puncture wounds, my body could heal the rest. He had limited healing powers on the best day, and so he kept his efforts at a minimum.

Just before the point of the heated poker split the skin of my sternum, I managed to take a deep breath and stiffen my torso. I expelled the breath even as I felt it ram through me and lodge somewhere inside of me closer to my spine. My eyes never left Herold’s. I watched a slow smile spread across his face.

“Better,” he said with a nod.

“Be less predictable,” I said. The sparring with Herold helped me detach myself from the physical pain that spread through my body. I reached down and grabbed hold of the slim rod and yanked it out of my sternum. I kept my breath steady and focused on the simple inhale and exhale of my breath. Then I dropped the poker onto the floor where it landed with a heavy clang.  I returned my hands to the small tables at my side.

“How do you feel?” Herold asked. He stepped closer to me, and I watched his eyes moving up and down my body. I wondered how many times he had asked that question of some poor schmuck while he had been alive. He was practically licking his lips.

“Pissed off,” I said truthfully. “Like I’m being yanked around by some prick who likes to play God.” I leaned over in the chair and pulled on the buckles that held my ankles. As soon as my feet were free, I stood up. Then I allowed myself to look down my chest. The wound was completely closed, and there was nothing but a small drizzle of blood to mark where it had been. “You’re supposed to ask me before you heal me,” I said.

“That wasn’t me,” Herold said. He looked like a fucking Cheshire cat. “I think you’re ready to progress to the next level.”

I frowned. “I don’t have any healing magic,” I said. “How could this be healed if you didn’t do it?”

“It’s an interesting question,” Herold said. He moved quickly to his desk, and I watched as he started to scrawl notes on his pad of paper. “It’s one that I’ve often wanted to study, but there are very few individuals who can actually achieve the kind of control that you just displayed.”

“I’m not controlling anything yet,” I said. “I still feel it every time you decide to poke, prod, crush or hit me over the head with something.”

Herold turned to me with a thoughtful expression. “But yet, when your instinct told you that I was going to attack, you were able to detach yourself from it. That detachment made the whole incident basically cease to exist; thereby it had practically no actual impact on your body.”

I rubbed my face. It had been a long day, and I wasn’t in the mood for Herold’s fanciful preaching and bullshit theories. “Break it down to actual words that make sense for the common man, Herold.”

“You didn’t require healing because as far as your body is concerned, the wound never happened.”

My jaw went slack. “Come again?”

“This is the pinnacle of anything you could learn from me,” Herold said. “I can teach you how to mitigate pain, but you’ve taken that leaps and bounds further. If you can do what you just did on a regular basis, you’d be practically invincible.”

I stayed with Herold for two more weeks after that, but I wasn’t able to replicate what I had been able to do that one day again. I had no idea how I managed to do what I had done, and I watched as Herold grew increasingly frustrated with me when I couldn’t produce the same effect. We parted company, and I forgot about it.

It was Herold’s lessons that allowed me to keep going, even when wounded, when I knew I needed to fight. As I laid on the cot and felt myself growing weaker by the minute, I couldn’t help but think of the irony. I had known exactly what Benjamin was going to do when he went after Paige. That’s why I had thrown myself in front of her. I willingly took the knife for her to protect her. If I had been able to figure out how to control my body’s reaction like I had done that day with Herold, I wouldn’t be in this mess.

“Riley?” I heard Paige’s voice penetrate my thoughts. I felt the brush of her hair tickle the side of my face as she leaned over me. She smelled like cherry blossoms. “Can you hear me?”

I kept my eyes closed and my breath even. If she thought that I was passed out, hopefully, she’d leave me alone.

“That angel got him real good.” Another voice floated to my ears. I knew it, but the way that it was distorted told me the truth of the matter. My sweet, kind, gentle older sister was here with me, but she had brought along her demon. I wanted to speak the words that would draw it out of her, but there was no way that I could expel the demon without harming Gabrielle. The demon had to leave her body willingly.

“He just needs to rest,” Paige murmured.

“Rest? Shit. That boy’s going to be resting a good long time the way he’s going. Are you blind?”

The brush of hair left my cheek, and I immediately missed it. “Stop it. If you aren’t here to help, then you can go somewhere else.”

“Who says I’m not helping? I’m helping you face reality. My baby brother is about to join us here in Hell permanently. Bruno has a room picked out just for him. And don’t worry. He’ll have plenty of company. It’s just a matter of time.  ”

“You’re wrong.” Paige’s voice was vehement. That should have made me feel better, and for a brief moment I thought about turning over and pulling her down to lay beside me. Then I remembered the way the light left her eyes when I asked her the most important question I had ever asked anyone in my life.