Bound By Lucifer by Aiden Pierce
Chapter Twenty-One
Lucifer
Gluttony – Past
When you’ve spent eons with wings, you get pretty damn used to flying. Wings have their uses, like being able to fly over oceans, deserts, volcanoes, piranha-infested swamps. When you’re slowly crawling you’re way out of Hell with two bleeding wounds where your own father ripped out your wings, you have to walk.
We’d finally made it to the Third Circle. I knew pure misery was in store for us when Greed ended up being fairly easy to weather. There was a pattern. Each floor seemed to alternate in how difficult it was to get through it. The River Styx on the fifth layer had been one long nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Before that, the Sixth Circle had been one sweltering cemetery. It stunk, and the screams just bled to white noise after a while, but overall, it had been tolerable. Now, what were Lilith and I reduced to endure? Wading through shit-filled mires that stretched on for fucking ever.
My legs were stronger than most mortal men’s, but they still screamed in agony with every step I took and with every step, I had to pry myself from the mud. I glanced over at Lilith, who was much shorter than me, the filth all the way up to her thighs. She was covered in a thin layer of mud but blood and feathers, how she managed to still look beautiful. Maybe it was the flicker of defiance that burned in her gray eyes, spurring on her aching muscles.
I could only venture a vague guess as to how long we’d been walking.
Too long. Too damn long.
The days bled into weeks and the weeks into months. It could have been years. We didn’t need to sleep or eat to survive, but it sure would have been damn nice to have those things. But no, we had to keep going.
I had to make it out of here to get to Eve.
For whatever reason, the thought of her made me think of Lilith instead. I guess it was hard to think of anyone other than the demon queen, who had basically been my only companion in my travels since I landed in the Ninth Circle.
She caught my gaze. Maybe it was just my delirium, but it was almost like she had been renewed with a bit of energy when she looked at me, her spine straightening and her short legs continuing to weed through the sludge-like mud even though her every muscle had to be on fire.
“You’re staring again.”
“What else am I supposed to look at,” I scoffed, stretching my arms out to gesture at the horizon, where there was nothing but endless planes of mud and the occasional dead tree or clump of long-dead grass.
“If you take your shirt off, then I’ll have something to keep me entertained.”
I laughed when her cheeks flared with heat. She looked so good in red. I simultaneously loved and hated that color on her. It was the perfect shade against her pale flesh. It made my beast whine with the need to take her. And I hated him for it, the lustful monster inside me making me think dirty thoughts about her. About a woman who wasn’t mine.
Mine, it moaned like a petulant child. She is mine.
That part of me kept whispering those words all the fucking time. It never shut up. But it was only saying those things because the beast inside me was weak to temptation.
That’s what Father had always said. He’d always said to find Eve if I wanted to get back on the right path. Eve. The woman with whom I had succumb to temptation would somehow be my salvation.
It didn’t make any damn sense. Despite that, that’s who Father told me to turn my attention to. Make her fall in love with me. If she could fall in love with a monster like me, he could make it, so this whole thing had never happened.
Eve was my quest. Not Lilith. So why was it always wicked thoughts of Lilith that tormented me? I couldn’t shake the fantasies. With her naked body stretched out for me, her lips flushed red with desire, her nipples peaked and red, her pussy raw and red from my affections, and her eyes, red with tears of unadulterated ecstasy.
All I could see was red, red, red.
Mine, mine, mine, my beast gritted.
“You’re pretty flirtatious for a male with a mate, you know,” she mumbled, pulling me from my own mire of devilish thoughts.
I shrugged, trying not to look her in the eye. “I was sent here on account of my favorite sin, lust. I’m still faithful to my mate.”
Her eyes turned to slits. “So are we still not talking about when you kissed me on the River Styx then? Or when you resonated—”
“Who knows how long we were on that river,” I snapped. I didn’t let her finish. I didn’t want to hear it. Meanwhile, I turned my gaze back to the empty horizon so she couldn’t see the conflict banked in my eyes. “I would have kissed Charon if he’d asked. That’s how damn bored I was.”
“I didn’t ask you to kiss me.”
“Well…” I laughed. “You’re more attractive than Charon.”
“You have to be kidding— Ow! Fuck!” A cry of pain severed whatever she was about to say short.
My beast was on high alert, his hackles up and ready to attack whatever it was that might have hurt her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I waded over to her through the mud. She winced, her mud flecked face contorting in pain. “I think I rolled my ankle. It got caught on something.” She hunkered down in the filth, the dark sludge swallowing her small frame all the way up to her chin as she groped around her ankle. A second later, she pulled out a severed arm, its gray flesh swollen and dripping with mud. Its owner nowhere in sight.
“Oh, gross!” She flung the arm away, her lips peeling in disgust.
“There are bound to be far more nefarious souls in the Glutton’s Mire, Lilith. This is only the beginning of our journey. Can you walk?”
She gave a determined nod, but when she took another step, her mouth opened in a silent scream, tears gathering in her eyes and streaking through the layer of mud on her cheeks. I peeked into her mind just long enough to glean the level of pain she was in. There would be no more walking for her. “Lilith, you can’t continue like this. Your ankle will need to heal.”
“I can do it,” she insisted. She took another step and, this time, couldn’t smother her cry of pain before it slipped out of her.
“Stubborn woman,” I gritted, my fists clenching at my sides. I hated seeing her in this kind of agony, but there was little I could do for her.
“I’m fine,” she protested with a pathetic whimper.
“You’re a horrendous liar.” I scowled her as I scooped her up from the mud and cradled her to my chest. “Put your arms around my neck.”
Her eyes went as wide as saucers, and she thrashed a little in protest. “Lucifer, no. We have so long to go. I can’t ask you to carry me.”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling you. Now do as I say, put your arms around me. No queen of hell or otherwise should be made to walk through filth on a busted ankle.”
This time, there were no more protests. She did as I asked and wrapped her arms around my neck, drawing herself flush against me. This was the closest we’d been since our kiss.
Lilith was a wild demoness with courage that would trump any monster ten times her size. Yet she felt too delicate in my arms, so soft, so warm. I gritted my teeth, biting back the arousal stirring in my groin.
She’s injured, for fuck sake,I internally admonished my beast.
She refused to meet my eyes, her cheeks blazing with humiliation. The temptation was too great; I had to peek into her thoughts. Guilt ragged in her mind, making her flesh burn against mine.
“I can just shift. I have wings,” she thought.
The moment Lilith and I had shared in the boat on the River Styx forced its way to the forefront of my mind. I had pressured her to shift, and it had left her broken and hurt, and I had to find out the hard way that her true form was something of a trigger for her. Because of what that bastard Abaddon had done to her.
I refused to do that to her again. I’d rather carry her through this mire for the rest of eternity than subject her to that again. “Just close your eyes, Lilith. We’ll get to the other end soon,” I lied.
The mire stretched on and on, and I waded through it at an excruciating pace that had my spent muscles screeching with every miserable step. There was no sun here, just an endless expanse of plain gray sky that went on forever. Despite the lack of sun, the third level was humid, sticky, and the hot mud stunk of rotten flesh and feces.
As we slowly made our way toward the inner circle, the rock far below the mud was hot, making it boil in certain places like a hellish hot spring of filth and decay. The bodies grew more frequent as time went on, and I realized that not unlike the Sixth Circle, this place was also a graveyard. But at least in the Sixth Circle, the bodies were in tombs. Here, souls had just been carelessly tossed away into the sludge without a second thought lent.
This wasn’t the first time Lilith and I had made a difficult journey from one end of a layer to another. On the River Styx, time had become meaningless. The Fates only knew how long we’d been lying in the bottom of that boat. But here, this was physical torture. Every step was a step closer to the end, yet it seemed we were getting no closer to our destination.
I started counting steps, and when the numbers went so high my mind began to fumble with them, I turned my attention to Lilith and began counting her lashes, her hair, her everything.
It was insufferable agony that made my every cell scream for relief. But here, there was no such thing as mercy. Only suffering. Suffering and Lilith. Even though my arms burned under the burden of her weight, she was my only salvation in this stinking purgatory.
“You’re starring again,” she mumbled against my chest, her voice heavy with exhaustion.
If it wasn’t for her, I might have stopped walking. In fact, I knew I would have. Maybe I would have just laid down in the mud, just for a little bit, so I could rest my burning eyelids. And what were the chances of me getting back up? What was driving me forward? I looked back down at Lilith and smiled, the upward curve of my lips feeling foreign now.
When had I smiled last?
When had I done anything but walk?
I walked until all I wanted to do was lay down in the warm mud and go to sleep.
But I had to keep going for Lilith.
Wait, no, Eve. Eve was the one I was doing this for, not Lilith.
Lilith.
Her name filled my mind until there was nothing else centering me but those two syllables and the gravity of her body in my arms, weighing me down.
I closed my eyes for the longest time. It was Lilith’s blood-curdling screams that snapped me back into awareness, and that’s when I realized I had stumbled and dropped her in the mud. Both of us must have dozed off.
“Lucifer! Something’s got me!” Her voice splintered with panic, and she flailed through the mud, reaching for me.
Something was dragging her down!
I stumbled through the mud toward her, sheer terror driving me forward. I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t let anything take her away from me. I didn’t let Abaddon pry her away from me. I certainly wouldn’t let any sort of foul beast that lurked in this noxious cesspool take her.
I lurched for her outstretched hand, her cries swallowed by the mud as whatever was holding onto her dragged her down below the surface. My fingers grasped hers just in time, but she was too slippery. She was jerked out of my hold and disappeared completely beneath the surface.
“No! Lilith!”
Without a second’s hesitation, I gulped down a huge breath of air and dove beneath the surface. The Glutton’s Mire wasn’t like any swamp, bog, or mire on the surface. This place was filled with more than mud. It was completely and utterly horrifying. Objects prodded me, and I wasn’t certain if it was sticks or bones, bark or rotten flesh. I wasn’t sure if it was mud or feces in my nose and ears. It all stunk like death, clogging every pore, invading every orifice, intent on dragging me down forever.
The fucked up thing was, I wouldn’t die, nor would Lilith. We couldn’t suffocate. The mire would simply swallow us whole, and it would serve as our tomb, encasing us in bile and waste, forever to suffer that excruciating pain that was the cusp of death but to never know its merciful embrace.
And that just wasn’t a fucking option.
I grabbed onto something, and the second I touched Lilith, I knew it was her. My beast knew the kiss of her skin against mine; it knew the comfort of her touch. I pulled on her, kicking at whatever was dragging her down. Whatever it was, it wasn’t as strong as the son of God. I slammed my boot down on the arm holding her leg, and its gurgle of pain echoed through the mud.
Swimming through the mud wasn’t exactly an easy chore. In fact, it would take an act of God himself to see us to the surface. But God wasn’t here, and I wasn’t exactly one for miracles.
Through the suffocating murk, a thought reached me.
“Lucifer, the crown!”
Lilith was communicating with me through her mind. I had forgotten all about the crown I’d taken from Abaddon. The iron crown was tied to my belt because I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear it, hadn’t wanted to wear it. But now wasn’t exactly the time for modesty. With one hand still clamped firmly around Lilith’s wrist, I shoved my other down through the sludge toward my hip and ripped the crown free of its leather tie, securing it to my belt.
“Place it on your head, command them! If they recognize you as the King of Hell, they will obey!”
All sorts of hands were now groping at us.
Bleeding Almighty, I had walked us straight into a tangle of souls. And these ones were more lively than the random body parts we’d waded through on the outskirts. They tore at us without mercy, and it took every burning fiber of my strength to pry my arm up through the mud despite the creature clinging to it and shove the crown on my head.
“Listen to me, creatures of the Underworld. Release us! I am your king, and you will head my command. I am your new king!”
My command was hardly more than inaudible gurgling through the thick sediment, and for a long heartbeat, nothing happened. Everything fell still. Then the hands released us. Something rose up beneath our feet as if the very floor of the mire was lifting us up, mud bubbling all around.
We broke through the surface, and suddenly, the putrid air wasn’t so putrid. It filled our lungs with sweet relief. I wrapped my aching arms around Lilith’s gasping body, clutching her tight against me.
“You’re safe. You’re fine.”
Lilith’s gaze dropped to our feet, and her jaw fell. “Lucifer!” I followed her gaze to see what it was that had lifted us out of the mud. The scene was horrifying, almost enough to make me wretch if I had anything left in my stomach.
We had indeed waded through a tangle of decayed souls that had somehow become fused together in one big, terrifying mutant of a creature clothed in tatters of ancient garments, shreds of loose flesh, and dripping filth. It began to move through the mire at an incredible speed, carrying us through the wastes at a pace I could have only dreamed of on foot.
“Where is it taking us?” Lilith asked, clinging to me.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head, my attention on the passing corpses of the gluttonous as they blurred by. They moaned a disturbing symphony of wails and screams that clawed under my skin, shaking me to my very core.
Here in Hell, I had grown accustomed to all sorts of terrors that I could have never had imagined in my wildest nightmares. My heart settled at the pit of my stomach, as heavy and unwieldy as the corpses that sat at the bottom of the mire like sediment.
How could my father send me to such a place? Was my crime really so great it was worth this punishment? Were any of these poor soul’s crimes worth this?
Thoughts of revenge plagued the darkest parts of my mind. Lilith’s hand brushed against my arm, and all nefarious plots slipped away. Once again, she was all I could think about.
When a dark shape emerged on the otherwise desolate horizon, relief washed through me, unwinding my clenched muscles. It didn’t matter that it was a dilapidated hut with a network of docks surrounding it and nothing more. It might as well have been a flourishing oasis.
The corpse creature dropped us off at the dock and, with a clumsy movement that I could only guess was a bow, dipped back below the mud leaving Lilith and me on the dock.
We were so weary, our legs wouldn’t hold us, and all we could do was collapse on the rickety wood. Forced to the absolute limit of my secondary form, my vision shrunk to pinpoints, and my mind turned to sludge. The last thing I saw was the blurred silhouette of a great hound, the dock flexing under its weight as it approached. I wasn’t sure if it was my own imagination, but it looked like the creature had three heads.
Then, right before my eyes, it shifted, and a slender male stood before us in its place. With a shaking arm, I held up the crown for him to see.
“As your king, I–I command you to leave us alone. Let us rest in p–peace.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, darkness swallowed me, and I collapsed back into the comfort of Lilith’s arms.