Chapter 15

~~Mia~~

“I don’t want to help her.”

Sighing, Adron shook his head and gestured to her.

“You sure?”

She sat on her pile of blankets, while Adron stood by her closed teeth door, Kas beside him crouched in his corner. Hannah was nowhere to be found, kept safe in Adron’s guest room. Zel liked him, so he got to have a guest room. Hopefully that didn’t mean he liked her back enough to betray Mia and tell her what Mia was telling him right now. Not that Zel would care all that much if she found out Mia didn’t want to help her. But, maybe she would. Mia was now on thin ice.

Kas clicked once, but said nothing. Far as she could tell from his body language, he wasn’t happy about the situation, but that could have meant anything. For all Mia knew, Kas actually really liked Zel, and would do anything to make her happy. Acelina did.

“I’m ... I don’t know.” Mia hugged her knees to her chest. “The way she threatened me, I...” She put her forehead to her knees. The way Zel had threatened her had been terrifying, and Mia had read enough about this sort of thing to recognize the cold, harsh shift of context. She’d known Zel was a ruthless tyrant, but she hadn’t really been able to appreciate it. Seeing what Zel did to Vinicius the second time, literally stabbing him, and then looking at Mia with obvious ‘I could do this to you, too’ eyes had been an ice bath for her brain.

Now, she couldn’t stop picturing herself chained to the wall, being tortured, skewered, screaming in pain, and...

Kas rumbled a little, moved slightly in her direction, stopped, and resumed his crouched position.

Adron, on the other hand, came over and squatted in front of her.

“This shit really hits you hard, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“The ... bad stuff.” He gestured around vaguely. “Torture, death, things like that.”

“Of course it hits me hard! I...” She eyed the demon, his two big black horns, his demony face, before she sighed and planted her forehead on her knees again. “It’s not like that with other souls, is it?”

“Nope.”

And she knew why, too. He was about to say it, too, but didn’t. He didn’t need to.

Was Hannah like that? Just emotionally dumb or blind to other people’s pain? Didn’t put herself in other people’s shoes? Mia couldn’t stop putting herself in other people’s shoes. If someone else hurt, then she hurt. It was part of why she got into psychology.

Christ, what she’d do to be back in class, reading about simple little studies about why girls with absent fathers become strippers, why boys with pampering mothers have screwed up perceptions of romance, and why kids who grow up alone have attachment issues. And then of course reading about counter examples. She loved reading about that stuff, trying to figure out where it made sense, where it didn’t, and then having her perceptions flipped upside down by the professor. She loved trying to figure out why she was the way she was, did the things she did, felt the things she felt. Growing up an orphan, bouncing from guardian to guardian, of course she wanted to figure out more about herself.

So much for all that. Now she was in Hell, surrounded by fellow souls who belonged there unlike her, and demons who lived on violence and sex, and literally ate human hearts. Her soft heart was going to get her killed. Like maybe David had been. Much as her brother could be pretty robotic on the outside, she knew he was just as sensitive as she was on the inside. Maybe...

Sighing, she shook her head. “I don’t want to help her control Vinicius.”

“I told you about him, Mia,” Adron said. “He was a raging monster. Think Kas.” With one of his playful grins, the vratorin gestured back to the sarkarin. “Except enormous, and constantly bloodthirsty, slaughtering and killing everything he can get his hands on. You’re really worried about his feelings?”

“It’s more than that. Zel’s ... I can’t ... I don’t know if I can do what she wants. She wants me to be this tool of control, I can’t do that without getting into the mindset for it, and I can’t do that! I try, and ... I just...” The sounds of Vinicius screaming in pain, the sight of a titan panting and groaning with exhaustion and misery, she couldn’t wipe them from her mind. The memory was like someone pulling a blanket out from underneath her. Tapping into the aura Zel wanted her to craft was not easy.

After a few seconds of silence, Kas took a couple steps closer.

“Zel won’t kill you without reason,” he said.

“I know. I’m less worried about dying than I am being tortured. And...” And of Vinicius getting tortured.

Adron and Kas traded glances. After another short, eternal silence, Adron reached down, took her hand, and helped her up to her feet.

“Zel is a crafty bitch, Mia. She’s not some movie villain. If you’re struggling to do what she wants, and torturing you won’t help, she won’t do it. Just talk with her, work with her, and everything will work out.”

It was a struggle to not roll her eyes at Adron and his casual use of words like ‘movie’. Adron was right, but having things ‘work out’ was the exact thing Mia wanted to avoid. Working out meant Mia, on a literal leash at Zel’s side like a pet, working with her and her spire tools to break demons. Even if the demons deserved it, or worse, Mia did not want to be the person doling out that punishment. She couldn’t be.

And a little voice in her head was convinced Zel would love to takeover every spire, attack Heaven, and turn the whole world into her own personal buffet. Mia didn’t want to be a part of that, either. But, it was mostly the doing the bad stuff herself and seeing it all first-hand that terrified her. The scene in The Green Mile, that last scene with Tom Hanks and Michael Duncan, she still had nightmares about it sometimes, except it was her wearing the officer’s uniform.

“You really believe in Zel, don’t you?” she asked, eyes drifting down.

“Believe?”

“Believe. Like, she’s your leader, and you’ll do what she wants because you believe in her cause?”

Adron raised a black brow. Much as he tried to hide it, she saw the hesitation plain as day.

“Believe is a strong word, but Zel’s power and wit can’t be ignored. She took this tower in the chaos after the Spires War. She stopped Vinicius. She fought against Alessio. She...” He shrugged. Much as he wanted to sound convincing, the conviction drained from his tone. “She’s the ruler of Death’s Grip for a reason.”

Mia squinted back up at him. “It doesn’t sound like you believe in her, just that you fear her.”

After a long, heavy sigh, Adron nodded. “Yeap, that’s pretty much what it is.”

Kas came a little closer, clucked once deep in his throat, and shook his head as he gestured to Adron and Mia with his big tail.

“Fear and respect. What else would a demon want?”

“Oh I don’t know, trust!?” She threw up her hands, marched up to Kas, and pointed straight at his snout. “I’d like to trust the person I’m serving? Trust that they’ll do the right thing? Trust that they won’t betray me? Trust...”

Even without eyes, she could see Kas’s facial expression well enough, subtle shifts in his shark dragon snout. He didn’t understand why she’d need that, even after their talk.

She clenched her hands into fists and forced down the urge to punch his big scary sharp jaw.

“I don’t want to help her.”

“You don’t have much of a choice,” Adron said. He stepped past her and stopped at her door. It was closed, and he wasn’t going anywhere unless she opened it for him. “I’ll try and play damage control with Zel, but I’m not gonna lie, Mia. I’m siding with Zel. I always side with Zel, because she’s the big bad and she’s earned the right to be the big bad. You can even find statues of her, ones Hell grew, because Hell recognizes Zel’s power and influence. And, much as I know you hate this idea, Zel isn’t all that bad compared to a lot of the other spire rulers.”

Mia shivered and hugged herself.

“And Alessio?”

Alessio, another tetrad like Zel, was the ruler of the province counter-clockwise from Death’s Grip, some place called the Black Valley. Clockwise was the Grave Valley, run by Azailia, another tetrad. Part of Mia wanted to feel kind of proud that the province she was in and its sisters were run by women — or at least women-like demons — but not if they were all evil bitches like Zel.

Adron looked Kas’s way. Kas did nothing for a couple moments before shrugging and rubbing a claw on one of his horns, like an angry man picking his fingernails with a big knife.

“She’s different,” Kas said.

“Different. Well thanks for the detailed explanation!”

Adron shook his head as he squatted down in front of her.

“Mia, what we’re trying to say is—”

“This is Hell and Zel is a better option than the others?”

Again the two boys looked between each other and back to her.

Kas spoke first. “He—”

“The fact there’s worse options doesn’t mean this option is a good option! That’s not how that works!” David’s words came flying out of her mouth before she could stop them. “That’s not logical! You don’t just take all the options and draw a line in the middle and call that a reasonable compromise! You use other things, other points as your reference, and ... and...” Okay, she wasn’t David, and the exact details of the logic fallacies escaped her. But she could still understand it! “I’m not going to just accept this situation because it’s better than the alternative. I won’t accept it! I’m...”

Another heavy silence fell on them. It was cliché at this point, heavy silences, the inescapable reality that she was in Hell. She wanted to fix her situation, fix the problems, save herself, save her brother, even save the remnants. But she couldn’t. Adron and Kas knew she wanted to, and they knew she couldn’t. So no one said a thing.

It wasn’t long before Zel showed up.

“We will try again,” Zel said, voice solid and cold.

“I’m...”

Zel, standing beside the bound Vinicius, gestured to the beast with one of her metal rods.

“You crafted the aura yesterday, weak as it was. With practice you will craft stronger.”

Mia wasn’t entirely sure of that. She’d learned how to suppress the aura a bit, and craft some nuanced ones, but Zel wanted power. The only way to make her new boss ... master happy, was to push out an overpowering aura of control that would make Vinicius succumb to the spire tools Zel had brought. Mia just wasn’t that sort of person, and she knew it.

Supposedly, if Zel could get the tools to work, she wouldn’t need Mia putting out the aura. The spire could summon a horde, make all demons in the area come to the spire and pick a target to kill, where Zel could then use the tools to brand the demons and seal the spire’s command deep into them. That would force them to give into the horde, like a riot group getting taken up in the chaos and going on a mindless rampage, all guided toward her goal. It was less waging war, and more summoning the swarm to destroy and devour.

Mia was tempted to ask if Zel had actually ever broken a demon to serve her on a demon-to-demon level. The horde was one thing. Mind breaking a single demon into a servant was another thing entirely.

She gave into the temptation.

“Will that tool really allow you to break him completely? ‘Cause, I mean, on the surface you could break a wild horse, or a violent dog, and zoos used to ... still do, break animals to be a part their act. But that’s all psychology stuff, and sometimes animals snap and kill their owners.” Deservedly so in some of those cases.

With an almost motherly sigh, Zel nodded as she stood in front of Vinicius and placed her back against his chest. She had a couple spikes back there, not big ones like the bound monster, but enough Vinicius probably had to be careful with how he breathed. The hole in his gut was mostly healed over, but the flesh looked soft, red, and easy to tear. It wouldn’t be long before Zel ripped it open, knowing her.

“There in lies the joy of the leash.” Zel gestured to the small chain on the other wall, and its glowing amber stone similar to Mia’s necklace. “I crafted it using the spire, with what knowledge I had of Valzanal’s methods. The spire can create auras, more complex than a demon’s sin aura but not nearly complex enough to accomplish a nuanced goal. Valzanal wanted to overcome that issue, and so do I.”

Oh sweet jesus Zel wanted to brainwash the world, Hell, Heaven, all of it probably, and enslave it. Adron said she wasn’t a movie villain, but the tone in her voice said otherwise. Maybe Mia’s second bodyguard didn’t know his master as well as he thought.

“That’s...”

“Valzanal did like to plan for grand, worthy goals. From her experiments, I learned to craft the binding leash, and while it cannot impose an aura upon the demon bound to it, it can sense intent.”

“Sense intent?”

Grinning, Zel fetched the small chain, stood beside Vinicius again, and dangled it in front of his face. She had to raise her hand high to reach it.

“When I wear this, whoever it is bound to will suffer its wrath if they attempt to harm me.”

“Oh. Wow. Really?” That did actually sound pretty amazing.

“Indeed.”

“That’s...” Frowning, Mia looked down and scratched her head. “I’m noticing that a lot of stuff in Hell is about that. About ... emotions, intent, and desires, and ... and...”

With a satisfied chuckle, Zel put the small chain back, and squatted down in front of Mia with Vinicius behind her.

“It is sometimes easy to forget that Hell, for all its visceral realness, is not the same as the surface, is it? There are no atoms here. No matter. No true science to explain how things interact. That is the domain of the surface. But here in the afterlife, it is a world of essence and resonance, of the fabric of the afterlife that weaves together and forms the foundation the surface sits upon. A world of emotion, of ghosts given form, of intent and sin and...” Something stopped her, something that made her groan and roll her eyes. “Intent is a powerful thing, in a true sense here in the afterlife. I do not know what bricks God used to build this Great Tower, this ... Forlorn Tower, but they give the depths of our will true value and meaning.”

Damn. Zel really could pull off the philosopher speech when she wanted to. How could someone as violent as her think like that? If Zel taught a course, Mia would have loved to have taken one of her classes, just to listen to her talk about life and stuff.

“True value?” Mia said. “It’s not like that on the surface. Lots of people up there have the best intentions and see nothing for it but pain. Life isn’t fair up there.”

“Correct. On the surface, it is different. Your intentions and desires, your will, they draw in resonance, but they do little to shape the world around you on the surface. It sculpts and molds your soul instead, and if the Great Tower finds your soul saturated with resonance of a vile nature, you are sent to us, to be tortured and purified.”

“You ... know that, for sure?”

Shaking her head, Zel stood back up, and half turned to face Vinicius again.

“Alas, I do not. I repeat the old stories, and who knows how true they are. But regardless, you cannot deny the nature of your new life is different than the last. Surely you felt that, when you tasted that demon’s heart.”

Damn it, Adron. Stop telling your boss everything.

“I ... did.” She braced for questions about the images she saw.

“Then you understand that your ghostly body now does not sustain on food, but on essence, the lifeblood of this world. It is why it takes human souls months to die of starvation, if they are not injured, without a drop to drink. It is why humans are sent here, to be the first link in the food chain. It is why Adron and Kas can fill you with enough flesh to break a woman, and yet you survive, and climax a dozen times over.” If the woman had said that with a more flirtatious tone, Mia would have instantly devolved into sexy thoughts, but Zel was in full queenly speech mode. “The rules are different. You must learn to navigate them. I must learn to control them.”

Because she wanted to rule the fucking universe, she just didn’t want to say it so bluntly.

No questions about the memories Mia saw, though, when she’d eaten the demon heart. Interesting.

“Once I break the beast, I will wear the chain to be safe from any potential harm he may attempt, and enforce my will.” She casually rotated one of the metal rods she carried, the staff-like one with amber on the end, but not spikes or prongs on its tip like the others. “And if something goes awry, I will craft new tools to push him further.”

Mia tilted her head. Unless she was misreading Zel, and that was a pretty big chance considering Zel’s smooth, alien visage, its subtle nose and mask-like qualities, but it did seem like Zel wasn’t just describing her plan for Mia. She was testing the waters to see if Mia had a counter-point, or maybe, saying things out loud to see if they sounded possible even to herself. For all Zel’s confidence and intelligence, maybe she wasn’t actually sure what she was attempting was even possible.

“Have you tried breaking a, uh, weaker demon?”

“I have. They have a habit of dying before Valzanal’s rod takes root.”

Fucking god. Mia looked up at Vinicius long enough for the dragon monster to meet her gaze. She had to look away. He’d gone through pain as Zel’s prisoner, and more pain resisting her attempts to break him with Valzanal’s weird spire tools. He didn’t express it anymore than a stone could express the pain of a hundred million years of an ocean tide crashing against it. He didn’t have to, she could see the wear and tear.

Remember Mia, he’s a murdering monster of rage and chaos, someone who went berserk and didn’t stop until they’d made a bridge with the bodies of their victims. Stop feeling bad for him. Think of David. What would he say? He’d say ‘put up a wall, and just do things by the numbers’.

Easier said than done, when looking at a beast bound to a wall by a dozen chains, tortured, starved, and everything between.

“With time, when your aura is strong enough, perhaps you could ensnare lesser demons to your cause, hmm?” Zel winked at her and licked a fang. “The imps and grems are frustrating for their ability to resist the call of the spire. Perhaps you could control them, and launch your own wars?”

“Imps and grems can resist the spire?”

“Resist is perhaps the incorrect word. They are the simplest of demons, and their minds lack the ... hooks, needed for the spire to latch onto them sufficiently. Imagine shifting snow to build a fortress, or throw at an enemy, but the imps and grems are snowflakes still upon the air, moving aside as you try to snatch them from the breeze.” Even Zel watched the scrying pools enough to know how snow behaved.

Impas, impins, gremlas, and gremlins, sometimes cute, always scary, little men and women demons about four feet tall, gliding around snacking on dead demons and dead humans. Scavengers, surviving on trace bits of resonance found in parts of the body not the heart, according to Adron. Being able to control them would be like controlling a swarm of locusts, there were so many of them.

“You think I can do that?”

“If you can, you would be a great threat to me.”

“Oh ... um...”

“Which is why I have you here, now, in my grasp, the same as Vinicius. You shall be my pet, and you shall serve me well. If you ignore my orders, I will torture you. If you try and usurp me, I will do more than that, as I would with Vinicius once he is broken. But it won’t come to that, will it?” With an almost sexual motion, she leaned her side into Vinicius’s chest as she looked down at Mia. She held a smile, steady, almost inviting. “And, after yesterday, I realize that direct force will not work well with you. Perhaps, as souls would say, a carrot would work better? Do as I command and I will make sure your endless sexual desires are well satisfied. Kasimiro, Adron, Saldavin. Or perhaps you would like to take me up on my original suggestion? You and I, with Vinicius? Your body, in my hands, slowly lowered onto one of this gorgeous beast’s lengths?”

Okay Mia, think, analyze. Was Zel trying to get back on Mia’s good side because she realized she had to, to get Mia’s brain working the way she wanted? Yes, certainly, but was she actually in a good mood, or was it an act, and she was one second away from eviscerating Mia and making her eat her own guts? Down here in Hell, Mia could probably survive that, and she very much didn’t want to know what her afterlife guts tasted like. She didn’t want to die either, and learn if she’d become the first unmarked remnant, go straight to the Great Tower or whatever, and ... any of that.

Hearing a demon call her sexual desires ‘endless’ was also a strange thing. Demons fucked all the time. All the time! They had bigger sex drives than her, surely. Ugh, she could already hear David say something dumb like ‘denial is not just a river in Egypt’. Well, he was a hypocrite, because he was just as bad as her, and the only reason he didn’t spend six hours a day jerking off was he had a refractory period!

“I uh ... I think I’m pretty satisfied in that department, you know? Adron and Kas, they ... know what they’re doing.” Those two assholes had taken her virginity. She still wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Should she feel anything at all?

“And yet you cannot go five feet without that strange aura of yours tingling with sexual desire.”

Damn it. Mia blushed and squirmed. One minute, Zel was threatening to torture her, the next she was making Mia wriggle with embarrassment. How the hell was Mia supposed to tell if Zel was the evil, horrible bitch she thought, and lying to Mia about everything, or if Zel was actually maybe, kinda, a little bit nice, and trying to find a compromise with Mia?

She met eyes with Vinicius again. He stared down at her, made the tiniest nod he could toward the bolstara tetrad, and a heavy, quiet, sad rumble vibrated through him into the floor.

Loud and clear. Don’t trust Zel.

Slowly, Mia set eyes on the rod in Zel’s hands as the demon queen turned and faced Vinicius with a raised, confused eyebrow. Her plan was to control Vinicius using those rods. Maybe she’d risk it and try to use it on Mia, too, and risk Mia dying? Whatever she was going to do, Vinicius risked another look down to Mia, and shook his head again.

Zel stabbed him. Another scream poured out of his body, and Mia squeaked and looked away, but not fast enough to avoid seeing Zel sink the jagged-tipped rod with the spikes through Vinicius’s soft flesh where she’d stabbed him yesterday. Blood gushed from the wound, splashed over Zel, the rod, and the floor. Getting stabbed by a piece of metal probably barely warranted a grunt to a creature like Vinicius, but the rod did something to him that had him shaking from head to tail, and roaring and screaming through his closed mouth.

“Stop!” Mia screamed. “Please, stop!”

Zel slowly looked down at her, eyes hard, playful gaze gone yet again and replaced with something harder, colder, and meaner. Uh oh.

“He is a mindless brute, and engine of destruction, little soul. Nothing more. Do not pity this creature. He has slaughtered far more souls than I ever have.”

“I ... I know, just ... please, I can’t try and make the aura if I see him like that.”

With a heavy grunt, Zel yanked the rod out of the beast’s gut. Bits of flesh came out with the spikes, and more blood splattered against the walls as she whipped it clean.

“Empathy. You will have to forgive me, young soul, if I am not familiar with it.”

“Demons don’t feel empathy?”

“Of course we can. But who would choose to be so limited?” Shrugging, she licked some blood off the rod, and her long tongue slid between the spikes with familiarity. “Now, we have wasted enough time. No more talk of sex, or Hell. For now we will focus on building your aura.”

Mia forced herself to nod, and looked up at the bleeding demon. Valzanal’s rod put him through pain Mia couldn’t even begin to imagine, and seeing a beast of a creature that big and tough and strong, hurt that much, made her nauseous.

“I ... I’ll try again.”

Zel eyed her, and showed just the tiniest hint of her jaw muscle clenching.

“See that you do.”

Nodding, Mia looked for the strings inside her. The more she got used to looking for them, the better she got at feeling them, like learning to flex a muscle she didn’t know she had. The strings weren’t a part of her, they passed through her, and something inside her could find them, touch them, and pluck them. She’d tried to visualize them a lot more yesterday, and with progress, she got better at finding them. Not necessarily using them, but at least finding them, instead of aimlessly wandering through her own thoughts and imagination, like walking through fog in a dream.

Whatever weird mystical fingers she had inside her that could pluck the invisible strings around her, they did their own thing if she got aroused. But right now, the last thing on her mind was sex.

She looked down. Better she didn’t look at the gaping wound in the monster’s stomach, or the hard look in his dragon eyes. Better she remember what Zel and Adron told her about Vinicius, that he was a killer, a demon who went berserk and slaughtered everyone without a second thought. Better she imagine herself wielding the leash of such a creature, wielding him like a tool, instead. Like, maybe, a princess, with her well trained dog?

Mia would never treat a dog like a slave, though. She’d love her dog, if she’d had one, love him and hug him and pet him and take care of him.

Zel growled. “Begin.” Again the demon’s jaw clenched. Her patience had run out.

“I’m trying. I—”

Zel snapped up straight, and Mia jumped back from her with a squeak, prepared to block an incoming rod. But Zel didn’t raise her weapons, or even look Mia’s way. Slowly, she looked up at the metal ceiling and around at the metal walls, and motioned with her one free hand for Mia to quiet down.

Mia gulped down hard, and looked back to Vinicius, only to find him doing the same thing as Zel. He stopped breathing, and the room went dead silent as the three of them listened.

Thump. A quiet, bassy noise so deep Mia felt it more than heard it, subtle enough Mia’s own heartbeat felt harder. Mia opened her mouth, but Zel shot her a glare quick and sharp, and stabbed Mia through the face hard enough Mia almost fell over. Sure enough, as Mia stood there frozen under Zel’s angry glare, another thump softly vibrated the metal around them. And then another.

“Stay here and continue.”

“W-What? I—”

Again, Zel stabbed her with her icy red glare.

“Stay here, and continue your work, little soul. And when I return, I expect to feel that aura of control, weak as it may be. If I again find you succumbing to your sexual urges, I will. Punish. You. Understood?”

“U-Understood.”

Zel was being nice with her words, but not with her eyes. Punish did not do justice what she meant.

She stormed off with her three rods, and closed the big metal doors behind her, again leaving Mia alone with the giant four-armed dragon demon.

“Okay,” Mia said. “Okay. This time, I’m going to focus. I’m going to create this control aura, and ... and...” Punish. Zel was going to punish her. She’d said it so matter-of-fact-ly, while her eyes had said a million things more, and images of evisceration ran through Mia’s mind. Zel apparently had a fondness for stabbing people in the gut, where they were most vulnerable. Then again, she also had a thing for skewering people on spikes, up the crotch and out the mouth. And the better Mia got at understanding Zel, at understanding how her twisted, devious mind worked, the more Mia was convinced Zel enjoyed torture more than the demon queen let on.

The dialog, the offer of reward, of a carrot, it’d been an act. She wanted to hurt Mia, and the only reason she hadn’t was because Mia was useful to her, for now.

Sighing, Mia brought up the runes in her mind again, the strange ones her brain couldn’t wrap around, and the ones it could. What was the one her mind knew as the battle rune, weapons and armor? Batlam? Zel said runes had power, and she’d also said the angels used that one in battle. Maybe it could help her?

She brought the symbol up in her mind, and ... nothing. The same as before.

Was there a rune for control? No, didn’t seem to be. What about the rune for aura? Yes, that one existed, but summoning it into her mind did nothing, either. A part of her had hoped the demon heart she’d eaten would have suddenly given her super powers, or the ability to use the runes, anything. Nope.

Stop stalling!

She reached down into herself, found the new muscle she could control, and plucked at the strings of whatever it was around her she was able to touch. Nothing. Right, she had to feel the thing she was trying to create, or plucking the strings did nothing. More like, her hidden fingers passed through the invisible strings, without actually plucking them.