Ruby Shadows (Born to Darkness #3)(20)

Laish frowned. “Kindly remember that this ruse is for your safety and try not to sulk about it, Gwendolyn. We must be as unnoticed as possible in this journey. Do not forget that the Hellspawn is also on your trail, seeking to devour your soul.”

My throat went suddenly dry. “But…you banished it back to the pit.”

“I did but as I said before, it will find its way back to you by any means necessary. Let’s not give it any help. Now, are you ready?”

“More than ready,” I assured him, but my heart was suddenly beating double time. Was I really going to do this? Was I really going to walk straight into Hell?

“Good. Then let’s go,” Laish said.

Apparently I was.



Chapter Nine

Gwendolyn





Laish led me toward the massive gates, which towered higher than any skyscraper on Earth. The wrought iron panels had strange, disturbing shapes worked into them —monstrous beasts and demonic faces which seemed to shift and change if I stared at them too closely. I tried not to but I still saw them out of the corner of my eye as we approached.


Though we were keeping in the shadows, I couldn’t help feeling nervous as we got closer. In my other trips to the Shadow Lands, I had been careful to stay far from the gates. I didn’t even like approaching the wall which encircled Hell but at least it wasn’t crawling with demons.

Speaking of demons, I felt my breath catch in my throat as I saw who—or what—was guarding those gates.

Two gigantic demons, each of them at least ten feet tall, stood watch beside the enormous gates. What struck me most about them—aside from their size—was that they looked nothing like Laish. In fact, from the twisting black horns protruding from their foreheads right down to their cloven hooves, their appearance was what every child is taught the Devil looks like. They even had red skin and were armed with giant pitchforks. It would have been almost cartoonish if it wasn’t so grotesque. As we watched, one of the demons opened his mouth to yawn, revealing a foot long, forked tongue, just like a snake’s.

“Ugh,” I muttered, involuntarily. “Why do they look like that?”

“They look like what you imagine them to look like, Gwendolyn,” Laish murmured back. “This is what you were taught to expect and so this is what you see. Believe me, their true appearance is much more terrible—it would drive your human mind mad.”

“But you don’t look anything like that,” I protested. “Uh, do you?”

He threw an amused glance over his shoulder. “Do you want to find out? Should I show you my true form?”

“No, don’t!” I exclaimed, before I thought about it.

Laish’s face went blank but he only nodded. “A pity. I thought you had more courage than that.”

“I just…I like the way you look now,” I said. In fact, I liked it a lot more than I wanted to. But was the Laish I liked just a mirage? Maybe I should let him show me his true form. It might rid me of the ridiculous feelings I kept having every time he touched me.

I thought about it…and rejected the idea. If I was walking about Hell with a ten foot tall, cloven-hoofed, forked-tongued monster, I really didn’t want to know it. Ignorance is bliss and all that…

“We’re here,” he murmured, breaking my train of thought. “When the guards begin to move, the gates will open. You and I will slip through and be on our way.”

“All right.” I didn’t much like the idea of “slipping through” a huge gate guarded by enormous, muscular, beast-like demons, but there didn’t seem to be much choice.

As if on cue, the vast iron gates swung silently open, emitting a gust of hot, dry air that smelled faintly of burning. They were so colossal I thought the mechanism that moved them must be the size of a small city. Or maybe they were opened and closed by some kind of dark magic. Whatever the case, the moment the gates swung wide, the two huge guards lumbered inside, carrying their pitchforks—which looked about the size of telephone poles—casually over their shoulders.

“It’s time,” Laish murmured to me. Up until then, we had been keeping to the wall and the long shadows it cast. Now he took me firmly by the hand and pulled me right through the middle of the gates.

“Uh, shouldn’t we keep to the side?” I asked, out of the corner of my mouth.

“More chance of running into one of the guards,” he said. “Go ahead of me, Gwendolyn—once you are past the threshold, they cannot turn you away and danger is more likely to come from behind.”

“Fine,” I muttered. I felt incredibly vulnerable stepping out ahead of him but I did it anyway. The space we went through felt as wide as a football field—though it was probably only the size of a tennis court. I kept my head down, looking at my feet. Ho-hum, nothing to see here. Just a subservient concubine just out for a stroll with her demonic master…

And that was when I heard the growling.

Abandoning my subservient routine, I looked up…and up…and up, into the eyes of a huge, bristling dog. At least, I thought it was a dog. Except no kind of dog I ever heard of grows as large as a horse. Also, I’m pretty sure the American Kennel Club doesn’t recognize any breed that has three heads—which this dog had. So when I say I looked into its eyes, I mean I looked into all six of them. And every single one was filled with a murderous desire to rip me apart like a piece of beef jerky.