Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Darkness.

Silence.

I didn’t even hear my own breath.

Pressure all around us, growing, growing, growing, until my ears popped and the demon stepped out into light again.

I took a deep breath—and inhaled an incongruent mix of ash-flecked air and the scent of flowers. The sky above was dark blue streaked with red, casting everything in a fiery glow.

“Lord Azazel.”

The voice came from our right, and I craned my neck to take a peek.

The demon—my demon, Azazel—tightened his arms around me and pressed me closer to his chest. He even pushed his hand that was behind my shoulders up to my head and shoved my face back against him, making any attempt at seeing who had spoken to him impossible.

“If you breathe one word of this to anyone,” Azazel said, his voice a shard of ice, “I will make sure you are stripped of your hides and hung by your intestines for a hundred years.”

My heart stopped for a moment, before two voices snapped, “Yes, my lord.”

Good grief, I’d thought he’d spoken to me. I’d been ready to crawl into the nearest corner to hide based on the vicious note in his voice—one he hadn’t ever used on me. Yet.

He took two steps then paused, half turned back. “That includes her. Not. A. Word.”

“Understood.”

I barely had time to take another breath before he lifted off with a mighty thump of his wings. We soared, higher and higher, the fire-licked sky a dramatic painting all around us.

I couldn’t make out much of the landscape below, but lights twinkled in the darkness here and there, some clustered together just like on Earth. Settlements, probably, some form of villages or towns.

Or maybe that was where they tortured the damned souls.

I shivered.

The air here didn’t have the same chill as in San Francisco, instead it felt like I’d opened the oven and received a blast of dry heat right in my face. Particles of ash clung to my hair, my lashes, and I had to blink hard not to get any in my eyes.

A thought hit me, made nausea roil in my belly.

“The ash…” I rasped. “Is it...it’s not…”

“Sinners?”

I nodded, didn’t dare open my mouth again for fear of getting particles right on my tongue.

“No.” He angled his wings. “It’s Hell itself. The land burns. The trees burn. Every part of her incinerates itself from time to time.”

Oh, thank God.

Then my brain caught up. “Does your...house randomly catch fire?” Did he even live in a house? Did demons have to sleep? I had so many questions.

“It’s manageable.”

That…didn’t sound very reassuring. I squirmed a bit in his hold, dread pooling in my stomach. My mind swirled with ideas of what kind of “accommodations” would await me, and none of them settled the unease churning inside me.

Sounds echoed in the semi-darkness. Like a dirge, mournful and slow, a chorus of wails rose from somewhere beneath us. It took me a moment to identify the sound—I’d never heard human voices like that, but human they were.

We must be flying over some form of torture pit then.

Bile crept up into my throat. The wails were so full of suffering, such sharp pain and despair, it tore at my soul. The one time I’d heard something remotely similar was when I’d watched a documentary on slaughterhouses. The pigs’ screaming had rattled me so much that I’d gone vegetarian that same day.

But these here were people. Human souls, each one of them once alive and now still sentient and feeling. And I could taste every one of their painful emotions like a cloying perfume in the ash-flecked air.

A horrible thought flashed through my mind. The demon could simply drop me here. He might—might—not be allowed to kill me as per the nebulous contract between us, but what would stop him from opening his arms, prying my fingers loose and simply letting me plummet into whatever pit of writhing bodies in pain? As long as I was still alive, he wouldn’t have violated the covenant, right?

It probably wouldn’t even be a big deal to him. He’d shrug and go on. Because how much could someone who came from a torture dimension care? Making people suffer would be in his nature.

I shivered despite the searing heat. It hit me now, worse than before. Back when we’d walked away from the bar, the realization that I was at his complete and utter mercy had been more of an abstract one. The fear I’d felt had been more subtle, my mind not quite grasping the full details of the mess I’d gotten myself into.

Now, that fear morphed into bone-chilling panic. Faced with the very realness of this dimension, confronted with the acoustic proof of others being tortured, my earlier realization of my powerlessness became so very tangible that it threatened to arrest my breath.

I’d provoked him so much. I wasn’t sure how much worse I could have made the beginning of this sham of a marriage. I supposed I could have puked on his shoes or tried an actual Catholic exorcism on him, but even so, I was now likely high on his shit list.

High enough to warrant the treatment of a damned soul? I didn’t know. And that uncertainty shook me to my core.

I should have bargained for another contract, one that stipulated he couldn’t hurt me, when I still held a grain of leverage over him. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I totally could have made him agree to certain terms under the threat of not marrying him and thereby dooming him to lose his powers.

I had nothing left to bargain with, and I’d missed my chance at securing a modicum of a civilized existence for myself down here.

There was a reason I hadn’t gone to law school…

All that was left was to hope for some form of leniency from a being that had probably slurped sinners’ suffering for breakfast for thousands of years.

I couldn’t undo what I’d done so far, but I could try to be more agreeable and less...me from now on. Maybe, if I just made myself small and invisible, didn’t draw his attention, I could get by.

My mind firmly settled into gecko brain mode. New goal: survive, appease, avoid pain.

The demon banked, and the lights below drew closer. A howl rent the air, making me jerk in the demon’s arms. I’d heard wolves howling before, an eerie enough sound to unnerve any human with a bit of a primitive survival instinct.

This was nothing like it. As if a thousand screams were trapped inside it, the sound changed and audibly oscillated, rising and falling, whispering and roaring, the primal aggression of it raising the hairs on my arms and neck, making my muscles twitch with the urge to run.

I had an inkling, still I asked. “What is that?”

“My hellhounds. They patrol the grounds.”

He had hellhounds. Of course he did.

A desperate sound between a laugh and a sob wanted to wrench itself out of my throat. I swallowed that sucker down. Survive, appease, avoid pain.

“Lovely,” I croaked.

We swooped lower still, over the sounds of his monstrous pets baying—in welcome?—toward a large, dark structure squatting in the middle of the landscape still shrouded in gloom. I could barely make out details of the building, only that it loomed in the darkness like a fortress of epic proportions. Few lights illuminated the walls, flames flickering over what might be stone.

The demon began his landing maneuver, and I curled my fingers harder into his collar. Again, he managed a touchdown far more graceful than I’d anticipated, folding his wings neatly behind his back as he strode forward. No stopping this time, no letting me go to stumble to the ground.

Now closer to the fortress, I could make out more details. We’d landed on a small platform that jutted out from the wall, like a large balcony without a railing. From what I could tell, we were still high up, several stories above the ground level. The wall had a door and two windows—with what looked like iron bars attached to them. Fire burned in sconces next to the wall.

The demon swiftly walked up to the door and loosened the arm that supported my shoulders. I had to scramble to reinforce my grip on his neck and collar so I wouldn’t just slip and dangle with my upper body. Thanks for the warning, jerk.

As with the gate in the park, he drew signs in the air, each lighting up for a second before fading again. The door opened with a hiss, and he pushed through, letting it fall shut again behind us. His wings disappeared with a sound of susurration. I stared at the spots on his back where just a second ago his mighty wings had sprouted. There weren’t even slits left over in his fighting gear. It was as if he’d never even had them to begin with.

He strode on without pause, through a semi-dark room that appeared to feature a huge bed and a seating area. I only had a few seconds of trying to take in the surroundings before he’d reached the next door and marched into another room, some sort of sitting room judging by the sofas.

And on he went. Through another door, into a hallway lit by flickering sconces, the walls dark stone, painted in shadows. All the way, he carried me without a sign of letting up.

Under any other circumstances, with a different man, this might have been deemed romantic, but instinctively, I knew better. Something in the way he held me and walked spoke of necessity rather than affection. His face was all hard angles and inscrutable beauty, not a hint of softness or benevolence. He was as detached as if carrying a package.

It shouldn’t have rankled, but it did.

Here and there I saw movement in the periphery of my vision, shadows scattering or something slithering toward the ceiling. We encountered a group of small creatures, three feet tall at the most and looking disturbingly like a mix between a house-elf from Harry Potter and the yucky thing cuddling up to Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

As one, the group threw itself on the floor, heads bowed, as the demon walked by. I peeked over his shoulder once we’d passed and watched them scramble back up to a stand after a moment, chattering and busying themselves with what looked like cleaning. House-elves indeed. Not as cute as Dobby, though.

After what seemed like an eternity of traversing hallway after hallway, winding staircases and maze-like turns and bends, the demon finally stopped in front of a door. He let go, and I slid-hopped down his front and managed to stand without falling over, which I was quite proud of, given the fact I was rather stiff from being carried in the same position for possibly hours.

He swung open the door and waved me inside.

Gingerly, I entered, expecting the worst.

What greeted me was far from that.

A spacious room, the stone walls whitewashed and reflecting the firelight from the sconces scattered around. Rugs on the floor, tapestries on the walls, comfy furniture to lounge on, decorative tables with books on them. For all intents and purposes, this was a beautifully appointed living room with a medieval flair.

Two more doors in the left- and right-hand walls stood open, and I walked over to peer through them. Door number one led to a room that was mostly empty except for some more rugs on the floor and...a treadmill? I blinked, shook my head and backed out to check out the other door.

It led into a bedroom, dominated by a large four-poster bed piled high with cushions, an armoire, two armchairs with a table set between them, and another door in the opposite wall. I glimpsed a shower and a sink through the doorway. A bathroom, then. Alrighty.

I turned back to the demon, who leaned against the wall in the sitting room, his arms crossed over his chest. As with every time I looked at him, I was jolted by his ethereal beauty, so unfair considering what he was. And I didn’t mean demon. Jerks just shouldn’t be this pretty.

Still, my accommodations were miles better than I’d feared. My stomach settled, the panic abating with the realization that, hey, this wasn’t so bad. There were no torture instruments strung about, no fire pit to roast over, no monstrous hellhound ready to devour me. A knot loosened in my chest, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Maybe this would be okay. I could deal with a surly husband as long as I wasn’t going to be locked in an Iron Maiden.

“These are your rooms,” the demon said. “Your meals will be brought here. If you require anything else, lay your hand on the plaque next to the door, and someone will come to take your order.”

Well, that sounded reasonable. And having my own rooms was a boon, a place where I could retreat and be alone. Heaven knew with a brooding ass like him for a husband, I’d need lots of me time.

“You are not to leave these rooms.”

Wait, what? I opened my mouth, closed it again. Squinting at him, I modulated my tone in an effort not to show the spark of irritation inside me. “Then...you will come here?”

The demon’s eyes glittered hard. “No.”

My thoughts raced, same as my heart. Skin prickling, I tried to slow my breathing. “You just expect me to stay put here. Alone?”

Like a package he deposited in a storage unit.

The demon raised a brow, an arrogant gesture of confirmation without him having to utter a single word.

“Will I meet anyone else?”

“No.”

I exhaled roughly, trying to stifle the bitter laugh scratching my throat. “So I am not allowed to leave, you won’t come to see me, and I’ll be locked in these rooms for all eternity without visitors? No one to talk to or interact with?”

“That’s the plan.”

Oh, that motherfucker.

What was this, some fucked up version of Jane Eyre?

Scratch trying to appease. Forget about being agreeable. My good intentions of surviving this hellscape of a marriage went up in flames as indignation burned through me.

“You pop up in my living room,” I growled, “you pluck me from my life, drag me down to Hell, and then you just want to park me here out of sight and out of mind, not even making an effort to engage with me?”

He pushed off the wall, his eyes flashing like lightning, black shadows writhing around him. Two steps and he was right in front of me, towering with all the intimidation of a panther cornering a mouse. I had to crane my neck to even look at his face, but I refused to back away.

“Do you want me to engage with you?”

I shivered. The gecko part of my brain—you know, the one looking out for my survival, preferably in one piece—screamed at me that no, no, no, engaging with this dangerous hunk of a demon was a bad idea. As in, on a scale of one to Pandora opening that box, this was off the charts.

And yet…the anger boiling inside me burned away this more rational part of myself until what was left was a feral creature with bared teeth. I would take fighting with him over an eternity alone.

“I want,” I snapped, “to not spend the rest of my days locked up by myself like some caged animal. I’ll go mad!”

His dark power whispered behind him, forming a shadow outline of his magnificent wings. “This might be a good moment to mention that I also have a dungeon.” He bared his teeth as well. “Perhaps you’ll be more appreciative of your current lodging if I show you the alternative.”

Threats, threats, and more threats. I’d about had it. “You married me,” I shot back. “You agreed to this farce, you took a vow to be my husband, and now you’ll just shove me aside? You’ve known about this contract for twelve years, and this is the best you can do? If you couldn’t find a way out of this with all your demon powers—” I gestured wildly at him “—then maybe you should just suck it up and actually play your part and allow me a life instead of isolated captivity!”

His skin was aflame. As if underneath, his blood was lava, the surface cracked in some places and revealed a molten core of white-hot rage. My eyes widened involuntarily, my pulse stuttering. I’d have taken a step back—finally—if my muscles hadn’t been locked in some kind of fear-induced paralysis.

“You,” he snarled, his beautiful features contorted in fury, turning him into a vision of angelic vengeance, “are the one who ruined this.”

Was it suicidal that overlaying the terror pounding through my blood was the insane urge to reach out and touch his lips? Taste his skin again? I might burn myself, but I suddenly had a complete and utter understanding of the moth that gleefully dove into crackling flame.

Absent-mindedly, I licked my lips. His eyes dropped to my mouth. His nostrils flared, the cracks in his skin burning brighter.

“You had plenty of opportunity to avoid this mess,” he said, his voice reminiscent of the dark smoke forming his shadow wings. “And I certainly gave you enough chances to do so. You could have married any of the men who pursued you, and if you’d stayed married until past your 25th birthday, the contract would have been null and void.”

Like a bucket of ice water, his words shocked me out of the weird mix of fear and lust. My thoughts stumbled over each other, my brain drawing the connections faster than I could keep up.

Six proposals. That was the tally I’d racked up. At the tender age of twenty-five, when most women were maybe getting close to receiving their first proposal of marriage—if any at all—I’d had six of my former boyfriends ask me to marry them over the years.

It had started with the first guy I’d dated seriously at seventeen. At just a year older than me, he was heading off to college when we’d been together for six months, and he popped the question before he left.

Needless to say, that was the end of that relationship.

The next guy I went out with, once I was in college myself, asked me after four months of dating. I ran as if my ass were on fire.

After that, the proposals came even faster. The last man I dared to go out with, just a few months ago, went down on one knee and presented me with a ring on our third date. The result was me having a panic attack and him desperately waving at me as I sped away in the ride I called.

If there was one thing that made me run for the hills in a relationship, it was the prospect of marriage.

Dumbfounded, I stared at the smoldering demon in front of me. “That was you, wasn’t it?” I whispered. “You forced them to propose.”

“Force.” He scoffed and curled his lip. “Demons can’t make humans do their bidding. All I did was put a suggestion in their minds, and they did the rest.”

“You manipulated them!”

My head roared with the rush of blood. All this time, I’d thought my exes were crazy, infatuated, obsessed, I’d thought there was something wrong with me for attracting creeps who were obnoxiously clingy. And all this time, they’d been perfectly fine until a demon messed with their minds—because of me.

“Damn right I did.” He glowered at me. “And if you’d just taken one of them up on the offer, we wouldn’t be in this predicament, would we?”

Oh, so it was all my fault? Hell fucking no. “You could have just told me! Why didn’t you come to remind me of the contract sooner? If I’d known I needed to get married, I’d have gotten hitched all right!”

I would have annulled that sucker right after turning twenty-five, of course. No way I’d have stayed married. I suppressed a shudder.

“I wasn’t allowed to interfere with your decision,” the demon snapped, his teeth gleaming in the flickering light of the torches. Was I hallucinating, or had his canines sharpened?

“Oh, but you could manipulate everyone around me?”

“Only the subject of the covenant is off limits.”

The covenant. That fucking, arcane, life-destroying pact whose exact contents still eluded me. Frustration built inside me until I wanted to scream. “What else does it say?”

He tilted his head. “You really don’t know.”

“No!”

For a moment, he stared at me with an expression I hadn’t yet seen on him, like I was a particularly interesting species of insect that he wanted to dissect with thorough, scientific focus. Then one corner of his mouth tipped up, a sly gleam in his eye.

“That must be vexing,” he drawled.

Bastard. He wasn’t going to tell me, was he? Well, I could shoot right the fuck back.

“You know,” I said, putting my hands on my hips, “you might have tried to manipulate your way out of the contract, but all you did was ensure that we’d end up here.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

“I hate the idea of marriage.” I leaned forward. “I have since I was fourteen. If you’d done your research on me, you’d know that. You’d know that springing random marriage proposals on me would make me abandon that relationship faster than your wings catch fire. By manipulating the men in my life to propose one after the other, you made sure I never had a long-term relationship with the potential to naturally change my mind and let me accept the idea of real commitment with strings attached.” I gave him a smile that was all teeth. “You ruined this.”

The look that flashed across his face would have been comical under different circumstances. For a second, a glorious second, real surprise flickered over his features, mingled with disbelief and bafflement. I had an inkling that his control rarely slipped, that he usually kept his true emotions on a tight leash and only showed a calculated version of himself, allowing rage and aggression out but suppressing anything else.

It would make sense for a demon raised in Hell, I guess.

So this little slip, this brief glimpse at a raw, untempered reaction, was a glimmer of victory in a war I hadn’t realized I was waging. It gave me a weird kind of satisfaction.

His expression shuttered in the next instant, the cracks of fire in his skin closing up before my eyes. How surreal to see cinematic special effects in real life, my brain supplied helpfully.

“Enjoy eternity alone,” he murmured as he stepped back, drawing the shadows into himself again.

He was at the door before I could shake myself out of my stupor.

“Wait!” I called out.

Too late.

The door fell shut behind him, and a horrible click sounded with the finality of a nail being driven into a coffin.

My breath hitched, and I rushed to the door. Pulled on it. To no avail. It didn’t budge.

He’d locked me in.

I pounded on the metal. “Azazel!”

My answer was silence, the only sound that of my own labored breathing, the pulse in my head, and the crackling of the torches.

That motherfucking bastard.

I’d expected obvious torture, instruments of pain, the punishment of burning. I’d feared being flayed alive or chewed up by a hellhound, maybe being subjected to an endless rerun of the Cats movie.

I had never entertained the idea of being tortured with solitary confinement.

I was an introvert by nature, I did well with being alone, doing my own thing, enjoying the quiet.

But even the most reserved person needed some form of connection. Input beyond books and her own thoughts.

I would wither away here, driven to insanity by the stifling silence of my separation, by the tricks my mind would start to play in an effort to find something to do. I had seen what happened to zoo animals whose exhibits were too small for their wild nature. Broken gazes, numbed instincts, mindless pacing within a tight space that defined their existence.

A poem I’d once read by Rainer Maria Rilke resurfaced from the depths of my memory, about a panther staring out through bars into a world he couldn’t grasp anymore, his vision filled only with the limits of his own enclosure. Pacing in ever tighter circles, his mighty will paralyzed, any and all memories and impressions that make it through the fog in his mind find their death in his heart.

I remembered being moved to tears by the words, by the image they painted.

That same helplessness and despair now crawled through me, drawing the picture of my own future in the same forlorn strokes.

A dry sob wanted to claw its way out of my chest.

No.

I would not cry. Not for myself. I’d already shed tears for my mom, for the people I cared about and the loss they’d suffer with me gone, but I would not weep for my own future—because I would make sure it didn’t resemble that of a panther crippled by captivity.

If that cantankerous douche of a demon thought he could just put me in storage here like a package and I would take it with wet eyes and a sniffle, he had another think coming.

I would find a way out of these rooms. I had literally all the time in the world—or Hell—to figure out how to slip out, and once I did, I would make it my newly eternal life’s mission to be an unrelenting pain in my reluctant husband’s ass. I would not be shoved aside and ignored. This was my life now, and while I never wanted this marriage, I would make sure the man—or demon, as it may be—who was my supposed life partner would give me the minimum of attention I deserved.

Anything was better than being neglected and forgotten like a gift you didn’t appreciate but couldn’t throw out.

But first—rest.

It wouldn’t do to start plotting my escape in my current state. I needed to be sharp, and right now, I felt like that one time I’d gone on a study marathon the night before an important exam because I’d procrastinated for weeks and had to cram a semester’s worth of learning into eight hours.

I’d made it and gotten an A, but I felt like roadkill afterwards. The kind that had marinated in the desert sun for a few days.

The events of tonight held enough excitement for an entire year, and I hadn’t had a minute to catch my breath and relax. My eyes hurt, my lungs were parched, and my limbs dragged as if weighted down with lead.

I shuffled over to the bedroom, into the adjacent bathroom—which indeed featured a toilet, hallelujah—and rummaged around in the vanity. I found a set of toiletries, much to my surprise, and did the bare minimum of getting ready for bed.

As soon as I hit the mattress, the torches simmered down to a faint glow. Neat. Eyes heavy, I shimmied deeper into the pillows and blankets, sleep beckoning with a velvet touch.

Tomorrow, I’d start my prison break.