Page 14 of Demon Stalked
I flap my wings as I clutch my screaming mate to my chest and take her through the veil into an entirely different reality.
* * *
I setKatrina down on the edge of the Cloud Desert, a vast wasteland of white where no one ever treads—except for shit monsters.
Whenever Heaven and Hell are locking horns, Lucillania likes to send shit monsters over to fuck up God’s gardens. In return, he likes to have rows and rows of orderly cloud cabbages pop up in Hell, lining the streets and making the entire place smell like a giant fart.
Yes. That’s the world I live in, the one my mate knows nothing about. Heaven and Hell are two giant immature kingdoms locked in a war that pits order against chaos, logic against love, rules against self-determination.
Katrina’s mouth drops open in shock as she peers around. And I don’t blame her. Hell isn’t a beautiful place. In front of us, there’s a glass storm. Droplets of burning glass form in the clouds and rise, burning people as they float upward to the sky, only to fall again, the sharp shards cutting on their way down. Getting caught in a glass storm in Hell is one of the most traumatic experiences for souls who end up here. It takes them by surprise to realize their surroundings don’t follow any logical rules, just as they didn’t in life.
I spread my wings to shelter Katrina from the storm, which is ending, the glass tumbling down around us. I want to scare her. I want her to see the truth of things.
But I don’t actually want her to get hurt. Not again. She’s been through enough.
Katrina bends down and picks up a shard that’s landed on the clouds. She raises the tiny piece of glass in her hand and studies it. “Fascinating.”
Fascinating? No! Fucking hell. This place is not fascinating; it’s terrifying. I sweep her up into my arms and fly on until I find a tornado of blood ripping through the clouds, splattering and staining them.
“They’re such a pretty pink, like cotton candy,” Katrina says from the cradle of my arms as she stares at the mutilated clouds.
What is wrong with her? Hell is chaotic. There are no rules. The logic and censorship of her world is gone. It should terrify her. Humans cling to rules the way they cling to hope. Irrationality scares them. Insanity scares them.
If natural chaos won’t disturb her, I know what I have to do. I have to show her demonic chaos itself. I was hoping to avoid that. I was hoping I could spare her innocent sensibilities. But I can’t. Clearly, she’s not thinking properly.
I pull her closer to me as I shake my head and take to the sky again. This time, I go farther into Hell, past the windmills that churn up sadness and despair, blowing it across the veil and letting it drift through the sky to land on humans as they walk the streets.
I pass the golden Lake of Good Intentions, where sloth demons steal away people’s grand plans and drop them into the deep water so they lie like buried treasure along the bottom, never to come to fruition.
I fly over Death Hill, which looks like a scene from a war movie. Except here on the hill, there aren’t any armies. Every person fights for themselves and for no greater cause. This hill is where murderous souls go after death. They commit their evil acts again and again for all eternity. Swords flash, guns shoot, blood puddles at the feet of the fighters, staining their boots as they battle. Bones protrude from their skin, but they keep on fighting, driven mad by the chaos of retaliation. Unlike on Earth, here in Hell, these killers can’t die. They butcher one another forever, their souls in a battle for that which can never be satisfied—revenge.
I grew up next to that hill, taught to spur those dark monsters on since I was just a demonling. I was trained to tease out the vengeance in every human heart and allow that need for retribution to spread through their system and color every thought a murky, bloody red.
Katrina does curl her body into mine and shield her face a bit when she sees the violence below. I debate taking her down there, but I feel like it’s a bit too much. I just want to scare her, not scar her forever. She’s too sweet and innocent to deal with the things I’ve seen. I need a different kind of chaos to intimidate her. And I think I know just the thing…
I wheel through Hell until we get to the orgy pits. This is where the lust demons are born, where most of them live until they join a murder. This was Van’s home. This is where every debauchery humans can think of occurs (and some they can’t think of because they don’t have horns).
The pits feed a stream that flows through this reality and secretly waters the garden with all of the living planets. I think God feigns ignorance about it, because it has helped him create life on so many planets.
But the pits are nothing but a writhing mass of sucking and fucking so intense that poor Katrina will run screaming and never come back. There are whips, chains, scat play, blood play; there are even those who fuck the souls of the dead.
I land near one of the pits, which is a literal dip in the clouds lit by reddish sunlight. It’s the closest thing to the human’s version of Hell that I can think of. Inside the pit, someone screams. It’s in delight, but it doesn’t sound like it. And Katrina does not need to know that.
She needs to see the tangle of bodies, the blood and the chains.
I watch her as she watches the pit. Her blue eyes grow wide, and her breathing grows shallow.
Good. Yes. She’s afraid. Finally.
But when her eyes turn back to mine, I can see her nipples are pebbled and the look in her eyes…that’s not fear. I was wrong.
Katrina’s turned on.
Shit.
I take a step back. Then I leap forward and gather her into my arms, flying back across Hell and through the veil at the speed of light, because there’s no damn way I’m letting any of the fuckers in the pit touch her.
She’s mine.
