Lord of Embers(The Demon Queen Trials #2)(23)

intact, but maybe not emotionally “How long will it take?”

P h ysically

.

“Oh, four or five days.”

“Seriously?”

“Time can pass differently here. But when you are done, you will feel blinding hunger and thirst.”

I touched my backpack. “That explains the snacks. And can you tell me what’s beyond? What is Hell, exactly?”

“There are many hells. They are places frozen in time, where people play out their same tedious and tragic life events, over and over. We will be like the other mortals there. Once we get out of the caves, our magic won’t work. And even if it did, we probably wouldn’t want to use it.”

“Why?”

“Because this underworld was made from Salem in 1692. They’re not fond of magic.”

I stared at him, my pulse starting to speed up. Osborne, like its neighbor, Salem, had been caught up in the witch-trials hysteria. In Osborne, thirty-two men and women had hanged, but many more died in the dungeons. “They’re stuck in the past,” I said, with a dawning sense of horror.

“Demons are drawn to emotions and sin. And that was how the devil came to Salem. The misery in Salem was powerful enough to draw some of the Belphegor demons to Salem, all because of the nonsensical ravings of a bunch of attention-seeking teenagers. The demons drank from tragedy, sadness. They came for the crushing emotional pain, and the Puritans served it up. The demons crawled here, slowly underground. They fed off the misery of typhoid and starvation, and skin lesions in the prisons, from all the lice—”

“That seems very specific.”

“Believe it or not, love, I wasn’t always the godlike beauty you see before you. Anyway, the Belphegor delighted in the sound of Giles Corey’s rasping breaths, the frantic kicking of legs as mortals hanged.

And that is how this underworld was created.”

I swallowed hard. “Are the people from that time condemned to a miserable afterlife? Some of them were victims.”

“Not as many as you might think, love. They were more than happy to watch one another hang.”

“Of course. And demons? They’re fine. Demons get on evil in a

off

totally normal and morally superior way.”

“Right.” He cocked his head. “I’ll see you in Hell, love.”





C H A P T E R 1 3 — R O W A N

H e turned away, but I grabbed his arm, stopping him. I wanted to delay the next leg of our journey as long as possible because of the whole screaming and torture thing.

“Wait. The Dying God?” I asked quietly. “Who is he?”

“His name is Tammuz, a primordial demon of unparalleled power. He knew my mother.”

A shudder danced up my spine. “Have you ever met him?”

“I visited him once. After I escaped. Stop stalling. There is no avoiding Purgatory if we want to break the oath.” He turned and started walking, and I reluctantly followed him toward the towering stone walls. “I don’t know for certain that he will break the oath,” Orion said, “but I do know he’s the only one who can.” He ran his fingers through his silvery hair. “Tammuz might be one of the oldest demons among us. Maybe that makes him a god. Some say he is Lucifer’s dark twin, a god of darkness. For part of every year, he dwells in the underworld. For the rest of the year, he rises from the dead. That’s why he’s the Dying God.”

The wind carried the scent of death, and the sound of screaming rose louder.

The frozen ground was hard beneath my thin leather boots, and my teeth chattered. The wind stung my fingers and cheeks, and a dusting of snow was starting to fall from the heavens.

“Do the people in the underworld know they’re dead?” I asked.

“No.”

“You said that people there are trapped in their tragedies.” My mind flashed with a fragment of a memory from the night Mom was killed, but it was gone again in a moment. One part of me remembered that night. One part of me was still there. “Is that how you feel about your time in the dungeon? Even if you’re free, you are always reliving it?”

He turned to look back at me. For a moment, his mask of confidence dropped, and I saw what lay beneath the beautiful surface. Pain, exquisite pain. Then his gaze shuttered again, and he turned away. “Are you trying to be my therapist, Rowan? Because that is a mortal

very

concept, and you’re not even qualified.”

“No. I’m trying to figure out what made you such a dick.”

As we approached the caves, he gave me a half smile. “I tried being nice once. It was boring and overrated.”

He’d been saying all along what he was: ruthless, lethal, lacking in

empathy. I don’t hide my flaws or lie about what I am.

But was that the whole story, or had love twisted him? He’d loved his family, and they were taken from him. Maybe nothing terrified him more than feeling that pain again.

Or maybe, like he’d implied, I was hopelessly naive.

A ray of sunlight escaped the clouds, lighting up the frosted stones around us like a frozen diamond sea. My breath misted around my head. A dusting of snow covered the gray earth before the caves. Near the mouth of a cave, I slipped backward on an icy rock, but with an ungraceful wheel of my arms, I managed to steady myself again.