'Tween Heaven and Hell (15 page)

I thought about that for a minute and then nodded, causing
Emo to give me a strange look.
Okay. But go away, this is giving me the
creeps.

When he didn’t respond I figured he’d gone. If he ever
really went away. At this point I was beginning to believe he’d just moved into
my head and put his underwear in my mental drawers. Nahhh, that couldn’t be, I
was pretty sure he didn’t wear underwear.

I moved into the passageway to the right and Emo followed
silently. I suddenly realized how great it was to have a partner who trusted me
enough not to question everything I did and I made myself a mental note to tell
him how much he meant to me if we managed to live through the night.

The passageway, while basically unlighted, seemed to glow
with a faint green luminescence that didn’t have a visible source. In contrast
to the rest of the cave, the walls of the strangely lit passageway were
surprisingly smooth and had the appearance of being manmade. The rhythmic sound
of chanting faded as we followed the endlessly curving passageway. The passage
ended abruptly and Emo and I found ourselves standing in a small cul-de-sac of
space with nowhere to go except back where we’d come from. “Shit.”
Way to
go, devil in my head. You really aced this one.

Trust, Astra. Use that with which the dark Goddesses have
seen fit to bless you.

“Bite me.”

Emo, who had been walking around the stone cul-de-sac
feeling the walls, swung his head around at my murmured exclamation and cocked
his head at me. I ignored him.

Closing my eyes, I reached inside my head for the spark I
knew would ignite the power. After a frustrating moment of nothingness, I felt
the power catch hold and start to build. Throwing my head back to open my
senses up completely, I let the power flow completely through me, not asking it
to focus or channel as I’d done before. The result was amazing to me. I can’t
even imagine what Emo was thinking watching it happen.

My whole body began to tremble as the power rolled off me in
waves. Dimly aware that Emo had backed away with a bark of surprise, I managed
to keep my eyes closed and my attention locked onto the power that was now
pulsing out to fill the small alcove. As it probed outward, gouging thick,
electric fingers into the cracks and crevices of the small space, I became
aware of an emptiness behind one of the walls. I took a deep breath and
withdrew the power to refocus it in that direction.

With a rumble, a pinpoint of light appeared in the very
center of the wall and grew, moving outward until a small archway was outlined
in the wall. I motioned for Emo to precede me through the opening and then
followed quickly. I barely made it through before the thing closed again,
leaving us in almost total darkness.

Emo said nothing, but through the velvet black of the enclosed
space I could feel his startled gaze on me as surely as if we’d been sitting
together in a sunlit room. “I’ll explain later,” I whispered to him. “Right now
we need to keep moving.” Having said this, I began to wonder where exactly we
were moving to. Since I didn’t have a frunkin’ clue.

Once our eyes had become accustomed to this new space, we
realized we were standing in some kind of meeting or office space, with several
chairs scattered around the walls and a large desk or table that was situated
in the center of the room. The floor beneath our feet was soft, like carpet,
only strangely not exactly like carpet. It felt silky and expensive. A pulsing
glow pulled my eyes toward the ceiling where some kind of dropped ceiling made
of stained glass hovered over the room. The thousands of pieces of colored
glass were forged together to represent a terrifying representation of the
devil, sitting upon his flaming throne in the heart of his hellish kingdom.
Around him, a variety of demons and lesser devils feasted on the unfortunate
inhabitants of Hades.

Emo tugged at my sleeve and I tore my gaze from the
nightmare in the sky. He pointed through the darkness to the far side of the
room, where a gentle green light pulsed, illuminating the entrance to another
passageway. I nodded and he took the lead into the passage.

We emerged after only a couple of moments, into a huge
cavern whose walls dripped, literally, with fresh red blood. The room was
almost unbearably hot, a fact which I attributed to the thousands of candles
that burned and dripped from the walls and that were placed in a giant
pentagram on the dirt floor of the cavern. The heat could also have come from
the hundreds of bodies that were packed into the space.

Emo and I stood on a ledge that was about fifteen feet long
and ten feet deep. The ledge jutted out over the cavern and, unlike the rest of
the space, was cast in deep shadow that was only peripherally touched by the
flickering candlelight from below. Standing on the edge of the ledge, immersed
in shadow, I could only imagine that we were totally invisible to the chanting
crowd below us. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this was not so.

Watching the scene below, it was all I could do to keep my
knees from buckling. I glanced at my friend and partner and the look on his
face made me want to get him out of there. Instead I reached out and gave his
arm a comforting squeeze.

Emo’s face had turned a slightly greenish hue and his skin
was damp with sweat. As he watched the primitive and strangely erotic scene
below us, his tongue came out and he was literally panting, something which I
had only witnessed once or twice before and which I found incredibly
disconcerting. Unfortunately, though Emo was only about half devil, when he
witnessed scenes such as the one he was viewing in that nightmarish cavern, his
devil came up in a big way and he really had to fight to control himself.

Unable to help him, I left him to his struggles and tried to
deal with my own. Being some part devil myself, I was dimly aware of a
primitive mental compulsion tugging at me as the deep-throated chanting pounded
into my brain and the smell of blood and death floated up to our secluded
ledge. However, I was much more angel than devil and my struggle didn’t concern
me overly much.

Below us, on a wide, flat-topped table that appeared to be
carved out of rock, a woman and a man lay, side by side, naked and covered in
slick, red blood. The man was fully aroused and, as we watched, he moved to
cover her writhing body with his own. The chanting increased in its intensity
as he slid his body against hers and, as he plunged into her, she threw back
her head and screamed. It was a scream as primal and disturbing as I had ever
heard, filled with pain as well as pleasure.

Their mating was violent and quick. As they cried out in
climax, the hundreds of masked, cloaked figures around them surged closer to
the rock altar and poured blood from squat, silver pitchers onto their
writhing, panting bodies. Then the cloaked figures converged on the still
writhing couple, pulled the man off the woman and lifted him high in the air
over the altar by holding him under his arms and legs. The chant grew in
intensity as they held him aloft over the woman and then softened again as they
set him down to stand beside the table.

The man was tall and ugly. His body was well muscled and
looked extremely strong, but his face was the face of evil, with pocks and a
huge, hawkish nose below deep-set eyes that were the color of mud. Underneath
the quickly drying blood, I could see that his body was covered with the
pentagram tattoo that told me he was a practicing Satanist.

Pulling my gaze from the man, I now saw that the woman was
strapped to the rock altar. As I watched, several of the cloaked figures
crowded around and took turns with her, lowering themselves onto her glossy
blood-covered flesh and driving her into spasms of agonized pleasure with their
attentions.

Although the woman’s reaction to this devilish gang rape
seemed more pleasure than pain, something about the woman made me want to
intervene. She was incredibly, inhumanly beautiful, with ankle-length black
hair that flowed off the side of the altar and pooled on the gory surface of
the cavern’s floor. Her black, catlike eyes and high cheekbones gave emphasis
to a heart-shaped face that could have been drawn from a dream by the world’s
greatest artist to represent one of God’s favorite angels. The eyes that were
raised to me as the man again covered her were almost purple they were so black
and held mine pleadingly.

For a long minute I was so mesmerized by her that I didn’t
realize she was looking directly at me, as if she’d seen me standing there.
Then, with a start I realized who she was.
Shit
.

Emo turned to me, his face even paler than before and coated
with sweat. “Yes. It is Dialle’s queen.”

Though I wanted to turn away in disgust, I found that I
couldn’t pull my eyes away from hers. Dimly I wondered if she was using some
kind of power on me.

Emo seemed to be thinking the same thing because he wrapped
a hand around my arm and gave me a little shake. I shook my head and pointed,
drawing his eyes toward the scene below.

The man convulsed on top of the woman for the final time. As
he screamed out his pleasure, one of the cloaked and masked figures pulled
something from beneath its cloak and, grabbing the man’s hair, dragged it
efficiently across his neck. The man’s flesh parted with a squishing sound and
his body jerked as it emptied hot, frothy blood onto the woman below him. The
woman’s riveting eyes finally left mine as they closed and her slender body
arched to meet the hot offering, apparently reveling in it.

The cloaked figure with the now bloody knife turned around
and, reaching up to remove its white, featureless mask, revealed to me a coldly
handsome face set behind the most chillingly evil pair of eyes I’d ever seen.

Nerul held the dripping knife aloft and smiled at me.
“Tweener Astra, though she would never admit it, Queen Kaline is most grateful
for your appearance. Without your interference, this ceremony would have gone
on until the dawn. The queen isn’t accustomed to being used by common Satanists
and lesser devils. Her pleasure in the experience is like arsenic to her
delicate soul.”

I stared at him, unable to come up with one of my usual
smartass retorts. After a seemingly endless passage of time, during which I
realized my thoughts were not alone in my head, I said, “Nerul. You put on a
pretty disgusting show. Obviously you were expecting me.”

The devil threw back his glossy head and laughed. As he did,
his robe opened to expose a broad, golden chest covered with soft curling black
hair. His pecs expanded as he tucked strong, square hands into the open sides
of the robe and pulled it back to rest on his narrow hips. He was entirely
naked beneath the blood-soaked robe and he appeared to be very happy to see me.
His straight, black hair was pulled severely back from his face and looked very
short from the front, though it may have been pulled back from his head in a
ponytail—it was hard for me to tell from my vantage point. The midnight velvet
of his eyes, which were deep set and tapered up like cat eyes beneath thick
black brows, sparkled in the candlelight and left a trail of fire on my body
wherever they focused. Although I knew it was magic and was entirely in my
head, the effect was wildly erotic and I had to put a lot of thought into not
drooling. My reaction to the evil package before me really pissed me off and
the thought that I was still suffering some residual reaction to the ceremony
I’d just witnessed didn’t make me feel any better.

“Look, Nerul, as you probably already know, I’ve been sent
here to give you a message. If you staged this performance for me you’ve wasted
a lot of time and,” I looked meaningfully around the cavern, “it appears a
shitload of blood. I have no interest at all in your sick ceremonies.”

Nerul threw back his beautiful black head and laughed, the
sound bringing the short hairs up on the back of my neck. “You flatter yourself
overly, little Tweener, you have merely come upon our nightly rituals, your
presence is purely an added spice to our proceedings.”

“I’m not the flavor of the week,
your highness
, I’m
here as a messenger, nothing more.”

He inclined his dark head, moving toward me across the
earthen floor. With distaste, I watched his black, satin slippers squish
through a river of blood and track across the earth to a spot just below where
Emo and I stood. As he turned his face up to me I nearly gasped at its chiseled
perfection. His brow was unlined and wide, his nose long and narrow, with just
the slightest arch that gave his face a patrician look. His mouth looked soft
and slightly wet, the lips full and perfectly shaped. His strong, square jaw
was enhanced by just the touch of a beard, which served mainly to enhance his
square, masculine features, rather than cover them.

His velvet black eyes were outlined, as if for effect, by
the longest, thickest black eyelashes I’d ever seen. My feet began to shuffle
of their own volition and my knees squeezed together protectively. When he
opened those lush lips and spoke to me in a husky, suggestive voice I found
myself getting short of breath. “So give me your message, pretty Astra.”

“I…” I gulped audibly, damn my fickle soul. “I am to tell
you that Dialle and Rayanne will trade your son for their queen and that he
will be returned in exactly the same condition as she is returned to them.”

Nerul’s perfect face split in a sad smile. “They have less
to bargain with. My son is dead, their queen is alive. Are they asking me to
kill their queen also?”

I have to admit this logic did render me momentarily
speechless. I shook my head stupidly.

I was amazed to find that Emo, who had quickly drifted back
into the shadows when Nerul had first turned his eyes on us, now stood beside
me again. I was even more amazed when he opened his mouth and spoke. “Your
Highness, Prince Nille is alive and well, with his soul intact.”