To Hell and Back by L.B. Gilbert

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Yelping, Valeria scrambled back on her ass. She jumped up, sprinting to the fortress, expecting to feel fangs and claws rending her into tiny pieces at any second.

But the beasts didn’t touch her. She made it to the garden where the nearest door was located—but no farther.

Michael exploded into her field of vision, landing in front of her with such force that the entire area was blasted with dirt and sand in a shockwave that knocked her against the wall.

Gasping and holding her bruised shoulder, she wiped her eyes with the cloth she had wrapped into a turban and faceguard.

Michael blocked her view of the newcomers. Edging to peek around him, all she saw were three small blurs and one very large one.

Blinking to clear her vision, she was eventually able to focus. The smaller blurs were sleek but subtly misshapen creatures—the Sheol equivalent of attack dogs.

Mierda! I’m looking at actual hellhounds.

Bulging with muscles and topped with horned heads, the beasts dripped saliva on the sand. Then one caught her eye and made a feint, its eyes red and reflective, like a warning reflector set in an animal’s head.

But they weren’t the ghastliest things. The entity behind them was almost the same height as Michael. It, too, had horns, but these were symmetrical, curling in for a single loop before pointing back out to act as weapons should they be needed to gore someone.

Their visitor’s face was strangely featureless and flat, with bright yellow-gold eyes but only two tiny slits for a nose. As icing on the horror cake, the creature had a row of razor-sharp spikes running down his back. The black and burnt orange spikes jutted directly from the skin. They also dripped a green-tinged liquid. Poisonous.

And then the creature opened his mouth. She recognized the language. It was the same one Michael had spoken when she’d fallen to Sheol, delivered in the same ear-splitting volume.

Clapping her hands to her ears, Valeria slid down the wall. Only it wasn’t enough auditory protection because Michael began to speak in kind.

Curling into a ball, she tried to protect herself from the sound, but there was no defense against that.

The words they spoke blurred in her brain. She half-suspected they were liquifying the organ—this was a language humans weren’t meant to hear.

Which meant she knew who had come calling. Or rather—what.

Her suspicions were confirmed when Michael said something in a tone so cutting her ear started to bleed. His companion responded in kind, tearing off his face.

Startled, she watched the mask she hadn’t realized was there fall to the ground. What lay behind it was an abomination—a hellish horror because the remnants of angelic beauty were still clearly visible in that wreck of a face.

This is what going native means. But who was he?

And then Michael began to yell impossibly louder, doubling the intensity and the pain in her head.

An argument between angels—it was something no human should ever witness. The sound and fury rattled her bones. Certain she was going to come apart at the seams, she tried to run, but she couldn’t make her limbs work.

The visitor moved, and a blade flashed in the light. But Michael raised his hands and the demon-angel fell back, his body pierced by a blinding bolt of light.

Covering her eyes until her retinas recovered, she opened them to see the creature prone on the floor—conscious and furious.

The naked rage in the newcomer’s eyes made her flinch. She would have run away but he was only moving his head as if the rest of his body were frozen. Just like yours when you landed. Michael was holding him telekinetically.

“Look at him,” Michael hissed in a more normal tone of voice. “Look at what Camael has been reduced to.”

She knew that name…but hadn’t Camael been an archangel, too?

Twisting, Michael grabbed her arm, hauling her up. He flew her to the top of the castle wall too fast to let her regain her equilibrium. There, he released her, letting her fall on the stones of the battlement.

He spoke again, addressing Camael on the ground, but her ears were ringing too loud to make them out.

Then Michael raised his arms, and the entire castle shook. Scuttling to her feet, she whipped her head in all directions, trying to make sense of what was happening. Spaces appeared between the stones. Valeria jerked her left leg up, stepping to the side as the stones she was straddling grew farther and farther apart.

Then they began to turn—all but the stone she stood on. Every other block that made up the castle walls and floors began to revolve, rolling in one direction.

The reason Michael had immobilized Camael, then got the hell out of the way, became crystal clear.

Clapping a hand over her mouth, Valeria cringed as the entire fortress became a mobile monolith. Slow but relentless, the solid stone pieces rolled like a bulldozer, inching closer and closer to Camael’s prone form while the fallen angel screamed, pleading for his life in that foreign tongue.

Blindly, unwisely, she touched Michael’s arm as the first stones kissed Camael’s feet. “Can’t you spare him?”

Michael looked at her as if she were crazy. “Look at him. He has debased himself. There can be no mercy.”

“Is the process irreversible? Can’t he come back?”

Camael’s screams were her only answer.

The shouts grew progressively weaker as the castle plowed over him. Closing her eyes, she turned away, her arms wrapped tight around her middle and throat so she wouldn’t gag or throw up. That Michael could do this to another archangel—even a fallen one…

Then everything grew silent.

When she dared to open her eyes, she leaned over, craning her neck to see over the edge of the rampart. Valeria could see nothing but sand and dirt. There was no pool of blood. Every trace of Camael was buried underneath the stones.

Belatedly, Valeria realized Michael was glaring. He looked pointedly at the spot where she was touching him. Valeria snatched her hand away, murmuring an apology.

“Don’t let this distract you,” he warned. “Your job is to do what I say. Complete your tasks, and you may yet see your parents again before you grow bent and grey.”

He assumed she knew the identity of her father. Valeria nodded, but couldn’t help but ask. “My apologies, sire, but I thought we were close to completing the prep work for the spell?”

Why was he implying it was going to take decades?

“We are,” he snapped before his irritated expression eased into a smirk. “I see. You don’t know.”

“Know what?” she asked, wondering what other elephant-sized shoe was about to drop.

Michael swept a hand imperiously at the horizon. “Sheol is not balanced. The barrier between this world and your own was twisted and thickened by that bitch you call the Mother. It’s all her fault.”

Her head drew back. Surreptitiously drawing away from his flailing hand, she tried to hide her fear and annoyance. “I don’t understand.”

He raised a golden eyebrow. “Time passes far more swiftly here than on Earth. It is of no consequence to me and my former brethren. We’re immortal and do not age. But for you—unless you apply yourself to your task—you will be an old woman by the time we finish —-while everyone you knew remains young in comparison.”

He leaned forward, his voice growing colder. “So, I’d stop dragging your feet and get back to collecting those roots. I expect a new distillation made from them before daybreak tomorrow.”

Nodding rapidly, she hurried to the rampart stairs to begin again.