End of Days (Penryn & the End of Days #3)(45)

‘I’ll open the doorway to your home as soon as you let me hold your hand.’ I have to keep myself from cringing away at that thought.

‘No!’ says Beliel. His eyes are fierce, like he’s just realized he’s in a nightmare that he can’t wake up from. ‘Get away—’

I grab the nearest hellion.

It grabs my forearm back, sinking its claws in. Pain pierces through my arm, but I hang on.

At the same time, Raffe jumps in and grabs the other hellion.

Then total chaos breaks out.

With an intensity bordering on panic, Beliel shoves Josiah out of the way and tries to leap out of the cage. Raffe’s hellion freaks and tries to rush the cage door, flapping madly.

I instinctively swing my blade to stop Beliel’s escape and end up skewering Beliel’s side.

As he roars, Raffe’s hellion leaps onto my sword.

It slides down the blade with Raffe gripping its leg. It disappears into Beliel.

And Raffe, still hanging on to its leg, disappears right after it.

Before I can blink, the hellion I’m holding dives down the sword as well, dragging me with it.

At first, I try to let go – Raffe’s the only one who’s supposed to go into the Pit – but the hellion still has a grip on my arm. In the split second before the hellion lets go of me, my hand slips into Beliel, and I’m falling.

I clench so tightly that I almost pull the hellion’s arm off.

We slam through Beliel’s body, and the breath gets knocked out of me. For a painful split second, the shock of going through the barrier almost tears me off my ride. But I hang on, tortured by the idea that if I’m jarred loose, I could end up in an even worse place than I might be going.

We fall through a darkness that seems endless.

I turn to see Josiah’s stunned face staring down at me through a fast-closing tunnel.

I shut my eyes, convinced that there are some things we humans aren’t meant to see. Josiah’s shocked face burns out of my mind as only one thought begins to dominate.

We are going into hell.





35


This isn’t the same as the last time I went into Beliel’s memory. This time, it hurts.

Every cell in my body cries from the pain of it. Hopefully, it’s because my physical body is actually going on the trip along with my mind.

Just when I think my eyes are going to pop from squeezing them shut so tightly, we slam onto the ground.

My stomach clenches, and my chin and chest sting where they hit the ground.

No wonder the hellions were so disoriented when they landed on Angel Island. I feel like I just got rolled as flat as pizza dough and slapped onto the ground.

I also feel like I’m baking in an oven. A very stinky oven cooking rotten eggs.

I force myself to roll over and open my eyes. There’s really no time for recovery when you’ve just landed in hell.

The sky – if it is a sky – is a cracked purple black with darker blotches. The weak light throws a purple cast over the hulking shadows above me.

Edging my vision, there are faces looking down at me.

I’m not really sure what I’m looking at. They remind me of angels, but I don’t think they are. They also remind me of demons, but I don’t think they’re those either.

Their open wings look mangy, and what’s left of their feathers look like dried leaves on a dead tree. The exposed parts of the wings look cracked and leathery. The wing bones are splintered, sticking out painfully through the edges of the wings. Many of the bone splinters have curled into a sickle shape, not entirely unlike Raffe’s demon wing blades.

The thing that shocks me the most, even though it probably shouldn’t, is that one of these guys is Beliel. It shouldn’t surprise me since I did jump into his memory – or a world in which he has a memory – or whatever. So of course, Beliel would be here.

But he looks different. For one thing, his wings are neither the demon wings I’m familiar with nor his original feathered wings. They’re half dark and half still covered with tufts of sunset feathers.

I guess since I’m physically here, I might have jumped in time and space, but that’s too much for my brain to handle without exploding. Besides, I don’t have time to think about it.

When my eyes adjust to the purple light, I see that Beliel stares in my direction with empty sockets.

Beliel is blind.

It takes me a second to convince myself that it really is him. He has deep lash marks across his cheeks and nose. He’s been whipped in the face. He also has gouge marks around his eye sockets.

The others don’t look much better. One of them has half a perfect Greek-god face and another half that looks like it’s been chewed off. Without their injuries, I can tell that they would have been perfect specimens, just like any other angel.

Between their damaged bodies, I can see we’re in a war zone or, at least, what’s left of one. The buildings are burned out, the broken trees are charred, and the vehicles are smashed and gutted. At least, I’m assuming these were buildings, trees, and vehicles. They don’t look like ours, but the hulking shapes look like they used to be inhabited a long time ago. Like a village of some kind. Something that looks like stunted cacti that have been stomped and twisted sits rooted into the ground. And there is debris strewn around that looks vaguely like wagon wheels.