Chapter 64

~~Day 84~~

~~Mia~~

The rider lost them.

They heard him walk by, heavy armor announcing each step with a clink and clank, but despite walking within what had to be a few meters of her hidden cave, he didn’t notice them. Even Cerb knew to keep quiet when everyone else shut up and listened.

A few hours later, Mia tore down the wall, and they headed in the opposite direction, back to the path that’d take them to James.

“Noah?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” He walked under his own power, but he held his stomach with a hand, and a hint of a grimace broke through his stone face.

Cerberus walked beside the angel and sniffed him. For just a moment, Mia braced to stop him if he attacked Noah, thinking him an easy meal. But the large, three-headed dog rumbled and walked further ahead with Mia. If she read him right, he really was adopting classic guardian dog behaviours, which was pretty damn weird from a cannam hellbeast. Hell had definitely birthed a special creature, just for her.

She patted his heads as they walked. She didn’t have to reach as far down anymore.

“He is not fine,” Vinicius said. “Hellfire takes time to heal.”

Julisa nodded and frowned down at her burned shoulder. Kas was actually walking upright like some sort of large-armed T-Rex so he didn’t have to put his weight on his injured arm. And Romakus made a show of lamenting his wing like it was a dying pet. Azreal, not wounded by hellfire, looked fine, though he was still favoring an arm. Probably had a hairline fracture in the bone that’d mostly healed overnight.

Vinicius walked in the lead, and Mia walked with him.

Mia froze. Everyone froze. Silent thunder and unfelt vibration pulsed through the mountain, and everyone turned, facing random directions.

“A spire aura,” Kas said, snarling.

“Oh shit.” Mia ran up to Kas and waited with an outstretched hand. “You okay? Is the symbol working?”

“It is working. I can feel the aura, but it does not control me.”

“Julisa? Romakus?”

The two tetrads nodded and looked at their wrists and the runes. They were fine.

“Angels?” Mia asked.

“I feel it,” Yosepha said. “It says to capture the unmarked.”

“Yeah. That’s ... scary. You sure you don’t need a rune?”

“It is only a whisper to an angel’s mind. Annoying, nothing more.”

It wasn’t a whisper to Mia’s mind. She might as well have been walking on a concert stage with the way the vibrations pulsed through her. Could the others feel it? Feel how far the spire’s aura reached? A hurricane of muted sound, vibrating through the strings and burying everything in that one command: capture the unmarked.

Thankfully, the runes she’d learned to block out spire auras were in her mind, and easy to mold in her thoughts to block out the aura for herself. If she hadn’t burned the runes on her friends, she’d have had to grab the strings and mute them, like she did when keeping her horny aura under control. Except the spire aura was playing big strings, and playing them loudly. Muting them manually would be brutally difficult.

“You okay, Cerb?” she asked.

Cerberus pressed up against her hip, and dopey head licked her hand. He was fine.

“The rider was not mounted,” Vinicius said. “The rider is rarely without a mount. He will find a new one.”

“Until then,” Romakus said, “let’s just keep moving.”

They kept moving. In the cavern where Mia had learned from Raphael, they found the corpses. Dozens. Hundreds. Demons piled on top of demons, corpses burning, meera metal shattered and scattered everywhere.

“Holy shit,” she said, and knelt by a corpse. Chopped in half from head to crotch.

Kas approached the largest pile and quickly combed through the charred flesh.

“Untouched.”

“What?” Mia asked.

“Their hearts remain,” Kas said.

Vin snorted. “The rider does not eat.”

“He has to eat,” Mia said. “I mean ... doesn’t he? He spends energy doing stuff.”

“He will feed his mount, if he has one. But that is all.” Vinicius shrugged and walked past the corpses. If there’d been any hearts to eat, they were lost to the spreading hellfire. Even the cavern itself was charred, walls black, and it all smelled very weird, like metal and meat and chemicals. Only tiny bits of hellfire still burning on the corpses lit the dark cavern.

“The rider,” Azreal said, “is no soul, or hellbeast. He may not even be alive. What rules he follows, no one knows, not even this creature.” He gestured to Vinicius.

Vinicius snorted back at his old enemy, but nodded. “The rider and his wife are unknowns to all.”

Mia raised a finger. “He really called the woman his wife. And Vinicius says the man is basically murder incarnate. I ... I can think of a man from a certain book who could fit that description. A pretty important guy, so important he might have a special presence in Hell, or something?”

Romakus chuckled, nodding. “Cain.”

Vinicius rumbled, but kept walking, and the group followed him out of the cavern of death.

“I never asked him,” the child of Belial said. “But I had thought it before.”

“Cainites exist,” Julisa said. “At some point, thousands upon thousands of years ago, someone taught the damned that they can fight back, and if they’re strong enough to kill an angel, they could eat the heart and gain great power. Someone taught them that. And someone gave them their name.”

Everyone looked at Vin, but he slowly shook his head.

“Cainites have existed for longer than I.”

“How old are you?” Mia asked, knowing full well what he’d say.

“Old.”

She rolled her eyes. “Can you tell us anything, Vin? Anything? You roamed Hell with this guy for ... how long?”

“Centuries.”

“Fucking christ, Vin. And you never asked him what his name was?”

Vin squatted in front of her, growling. She stood her ground, and the beast leaned in closer until the air leaving his nostrils pushed her hair back.

“You think a name means something?”

“I...”

“Violence is our language. And the language of man.” He poked her chest and her necklace, his leash. “Only when your life is near its end, and sword and claw come for you, will you truly know the person beside you.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that line. A part of her curriculum was reading testimonies from people who’d experienced heavy, scarring aspects of life, and because she was a masochist, she’d read stuff from soldiers. Damn David and his war movies. In the journals she’d read and the recorded interviews she’d watched, there was a recurring theme: you didn’t really know a man until the bullets came flying.

Of course, none of those men went to war expecting a good time. Vin did. And the rider probably did.

Kas snorted at Vin and walked between Mia and him. He had to shove Vin’s head aside to fit, and he did, earning a heavy growl from the child of Belial that Kas ignored.

“Come on,” Kas said. “Dobasi’s demons came here once. They will do so again. That aura will have the province stirred into a frenzy looking for you, Mia.”

“Shark Boy’s got a point,” Romakus said. “Let’s get back on the path and—”

And sure enough, the sound of roaring, screaming demons filled the silence. It punched through the dead archangel flesh, through the still, pooling blood of Raphael’s remains, and into the cavern.

Or not demons? They sounded different. Deeper, and scratchier.

Romakus chuckled and drew his sword. “Hellbeasts.”

Vin rumbled, turned around, and marched in the direction of the rider. “Let’s go.”

“That way?” Julisa asked. “I thought we wanted to reach James, or at least get on his path.”

“I recognize those sounds,” Vin said.

“Something you cannot defeat?”

He flicked his tail. “Something I would not fight in these tunnels.”

Romakus hooked his sword on his back again and gestured back to the tunnel out of the cavern, the one the rider took.

“If ye ole’ asshole here says it’s dangerous, I believe him. Let’s go. Unless you can do something for us, Mia?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can still barely feel Hell at all. I guess we just ... keep walking until we find a chunk of ground like last time, hopefully.”

“Didn’t you say you summoned a geyser of hellfire and killed a giant Old One with it?”

“I didn’t kill him! And there was plenty of Hell around to use, there! The archangel’s body is like a blanket on the strings, not that you’d know what that means!” She marched up to Romakus and punched him in the thigh. Might as well have punched stone. “We need to get to James. Azreal needs to get to him.”

Vin shook his head. “It must wait. There are creatures in these tunnels worse than sercanos.”

Mia groaned. A sercano was that giant lizard thing the rider had ridden in Death’s Grip, the one they’d found in the Black Valley. Not even Vin could beat something like that in a fight, and he was saying this place had worse things?

“Fine.” She followed the big guy, and the group followed her, straight on the path the rider had taken when he’d passed Mia’s hidden cave. Hopefully, he was far enough ahead that they wouldn’t run into him again.

“Noah,” she said, walking beside him. “You really should let the others help.”

“I can walk.”

“Kas, can you—”

Noah raised a wing and shook it instead of his head. “I am not riding a demon.”

She sighed and looked at Yosepha, expecting maybe to share a ‘ugh, men’ moment, but the angel looked convinced Noah’s actions were the correct ones. An angel thing? Nah, Galon wouldn’t be like that. A mikalim thing, then? Mikalim and rapholem were the badass warrior types. Gabriem were the kind, fun, caring types, apparently.

“Maybe when Cerb grows big enough, he can carry you?” she asked.

“Cannams do not grow that large,” Julisa said. Walking beside Vin in the lead, she idly dragged her claws along the flesh wall beside her, spilling still blood. Mia had asked her to stop once already, to no avail.

“Cerberus is the guardian of Hell, in Greek and Roman mythology,” Mia said. “He was super important! And a lot of interpretations say he was big. So if the surface world and the afterlife affect each other, maybe Cerberus will grow big?”

Julisa snorted. “That is not Cerberus. You chose the name.”

“Because he’s a three-headed dog.”

“A cannam. He is no dog.”

Mia frowned, but Cerberus rumbled. It was true. Much as Cerberus looked dog-ish, he also looked cat-ish, with his tail flowing behind him instead of mindlessly wagging. And the mane of black spikes made him look almost like a lion. His heads and snouts were kinda cat-ish, and dog-ish, and wolf-ish.

“Are there other cannams with three heads?” she asked.

“Unlikely.”

Mia beamed. “Then he’s special, and maybe he’ll grow big and strong, too. He was born big. He might even grow big enough for me to ride. Maybe even Noah.”

The tetrad laughed and shrugged. “Maybe then it will actually earn its keep.”

That wasn’t fair. You couldn’t ask a baby to earn its keep. And Cerb was just a puppy, a baby. Right on cue, Cerberus ran ahead of the group, sniffed the ground, and aimed all three heads in different directions.

A fork in the road.

“Well, fuck,” Mia said. “Which way?”

“Left,” the three angels said at once.

“How do you know?”

Yosepha shrugged. “That is the general direction counter-clockwise around Hell. Whether the tunnel follows that path, I do not know, but that is the direction.”

Right. Angels rarely lost their sense of direction if they had a clue where they were.

Vin went left.

Roars poured down the new hallway of flesh, bringing the group to a halt. Before anyone could make suggestions, Vin turned around and walked down the other path. No one argued. They had no choice if they didn’t want to fight their way through.

“James might die if we can’t reach him,” Mia said.

Julisa snorted. “You have never spoken to the man. Why do you care so much about him?”

“He might be a blood relative.”

“So? Blood ties are meaningless. What matters is context, history, events, memories.”

Mia didn’t disagree, and all she could offer in retort was a shrug.

“Okay. I care because he’s human? And according to you, a nice guy?”

Julisa rolled her eyes.

The tunnel opened up into a giant cavern. And then closed into a tight tunnel that had the big demons crawling. Then opened into a giant cavern, with a dozen tunnels connected to it. They picked a tunnel based on the angels’ directions, but they didn’t know where they were going, just the general direction of the way around Hell. And each tunnel they picked only took them deeper into the ground.

“This is getting ridiculous,” Mia said. “We’re lost.”

“Think we should head back?” Romakus said. “Fight our way through?”

Kasimiro shook his head. “I heard the voices. There were many creatures. It would be a risk.”

Risk was bad. But this was risky, too, taking random tunnels and going deeper and deeper into the mountain. Not even a mountain of stone, but of the twice-dead corpse of an archangel.

Vinicius ducked. Shrieks filled the air. Everyone ducked a moment after, and Mia squealed and threw herself to wet, bloody flesh floor.

“Bats!” She covered her hair and glared up at the black and red things diving from and through holes in the flesh walls. “Bats. Hellbats!?”

Julisa laughed, drew her swords, and cut down several of the giant, spiky bats.

“Virlkir,” she said. “Yes, souls call them hellbats.”

“I thought only angels could fly?”

“The stupid creatures glide well.”

Kas crawled over her, covered her, and reached for her. Something tugged on her hair, and it wasn’t Kas. She squealed again and flailed, but Kas pinned her with one hand and pulled a small, squeaking thing from her hair with the other.

Romakus stepped over her and laughed. “You are such a girl.”

“Shut up! Baldy!”

Asshole that he was, Romakus scoffed and ran a finger down his bald head. Him and Julisa both, bald, with four big horns. Zel hadn’t been bald, so it wasn’t like all tetrads were.

Groaning, Mia got to her knees, glared up at the giant asshole, and ducked again as more of the little creatures flew down. They were as big as fruit bats, and maybe they’d eat forbidden fruit, too, but they were going for her, and she waved her hands frantically as they flew overhead. They had absurdly massive fangs and sharp teeth.

Kas swung a giant arm through the air over her head, and a dozen more of the little creatures disappeared into tiny tunnels. They had to go through dripping falls of blood to reach their burrows in the flesh walls, burrows they’d probably chewed through flesh to make.