~~Mia~~

  The current carried her deeper into the vibrating ocean. It enveloped her, pulled her under the surface, and her thoughts blurred above her as she sank lower into the flowing waves. Her fingers plucked the strings, stirring the vibration, and something responded. Something pyed with her. Whoever they were, whatever it was, each note she pyed, they mirrored. And who or whatever they or it was, they pyed so much louder, so loud it was all Mia could hear. An ocean tide that pulled her, guided her, and all she could do was hold on, while some part of her still above the surface yelled down at her. Her own voice could not reach herself.

  Once, when Mia had been a child, she’d noticed how different and distant people sounded when she was under water. Now, that was her, her own voice unable to penetrate the surface. But the fingers inside her pyed their song, and the ocean waves responded with a million voices.

  The barren ground, the burning sky, the thorny bloodgrip, the veins of va, the burning bushes and metal monuments grown to reflect the past, she felt them all. They were connected to the ocean, a part of it, and they resonated with the unknowable song.

  Yosepha, crucified on a cross, stared down at her, the only angel not wearing armor, and her dark eyes opened wide.

  Mia looked around herself. More bck horns had appeared from among the crevices between the rocks, and red eyes stared at her almost as much as the angels above. Unlike the ground and sky, she couldn’t feel the demons, couldn’t pull on their strings directly, but she knew they were in the ocean with her. Maybe they didn’t feel it like she did, but they were there, floating on its surface like driftwood. And she would need them if she was going to save Yosepha and Galon.

  “Romakus, be ready to get Yosepha,” she said. “Julisa, Galon has fallen and lies on the mountainside. Be ready to get him.” How she was talking, she didn’t know. They were her words, and she told herself to say them, but they felt distant, words that had to punch through the silent choir in her mind. “Vinicius, guard me, and stop Livian when she comes. Do not fall to the aura.”

  “Aura?” Romakus asked. “Livian? What?”

  Mia held up her staff, pointed it at the angels, and prepared her song, her will. Over five hundred angels floated above, and unlike a sexual aura, an aura of Hell would not touch them. But it would touch the demons that permeated Death’s Grip, the mountains that surrounded them, the tunnels, the scurrying cws and thundering hooves. It would beckon them all.

  And while Death’s Grip may have been an unorganized mess of demon tribes, Zendariel knew what she’d been doing. She knew the power of her province, of the tens of thousands of demons within. To harness that power, she needed to use the spire to summon the horde.

  Mia didn’t.

  “Unmarked,” the rapholem above called, bits of Galon’s blood dripping down his chest. He hadn’t put the blood there. The other angel had, but this one had done nothing to stop her. He was just as much to bme. “Surrender.” He slowly descended toward her, shield at his side, spear at the ready, posture confident, and guiltless. Despicable.

  The angel with the crooked wing stayed where she was, but her red eyes gred through her helmet down at Mia with familiarity, and fury. There was pain in those eyes, rage driven by something that had happened to her, by the death of someone named Shaul.

  The angel was a fool. She did not know pain. She did not know fury. But she would.

  Mia smmed her staff down and unleashed the song. Her fingers plucked the strings as hard as they could, and the unknown, non-existent, infinite ocean became a tsunami. It swirled around her, responding to her with excitement and desire. It wanted to py with her, to mirror her song, and to fill in the gaps and flesh out its tone. Hell wanted to dance for her.

  Vinicius and the tetrads growled as the aura buried them, and they stepped out into the open, ready for war. Mia snapped her eyes back to them, and they froze as she cut into them with her gre. If the tetrads and ragarin were lost to the aura, this wouldn’t work. But her death stare yanked the demons back up from the brink of the horde call, and she nodded, satisfied, as she looked back to the angel now only thirty feet above her.

  A part of her wanted to give the angel an ultimatum. Leave Yosepha and go. It would have been the nice thing, the empathetic thing, the forgiving thing to do. But those thoughts washed away in the ocean waves that churned until it was all crashing water rapids. What was left was her desire.

  She wanted to hurt the angels. She wanted to hear them scream.

  A thousand demons rose from the nooks and crannies of the nearby mountains of Death’s Grip, growling, snarling, and the angels above paused as they looked at the rising horde.

  “What is this?” the rapholem asked.

  Mia said nothing. A death gre was all the angel deserved.

  She raised her staff and called to the burning sky. The sky answered. The clouds of fme moved, slowly at first, a crescent of shifting amber that gradually drew the attention of the shocked angels upward.

  The wind grew. The fire above pulled in on itself, and reached down, splitting the air apart as it turned faster and faster. The mountains howled, and the ground shook. A thousand demons roared up at the unfurling maelstrom, and all the angels turned to face the madness as it descended upon them.

  “Stop her!” the killer angel screamed, blood still dripping from her sword. “This is her doing! You must stop her!”

  The angel’s words cut through the frozen awe of the angels, and the nearby single rapholem dove for Mia. Vinicius stopped him. With a roar that rose above the growing thunder, Vinicius dove around Mia, and smashed the rapholem to the side. Angel reflexes saved him from taking a set of cws to the body, but Vin’s weight and strength were more than enough to send the angel flying back, barrel rolling through the air and almost nding.

  The angels had their cue. Nearly a thousand sets of angel wings descended upon them, but before they could reach the demons below, the gabriem had their moment. A couple hundred shining arrows shot into the sky, and like shooting stars, they fell upon the nd. But they didn’t go where the angels aimed them. Mia pulled the burning sky down and down, and the twisting vortex of fme tore the air open. Twisting gale winds grabbed the glowing arrows and scattered them.

  They decorated the mountainside, each glowing arrow sharp enough to sink into the rock, but none nded near Vinicius or the tetrads. Distant demons screamed, some falling to the deadly volley, but the second volley fared no better, hitting random demons that climbed out from their tunnels, but none fell upon Mia or her guardians.

  The rapholem came first, giant shields in front, spears pointed forward along their sides. The mikalim followed, smaller shields ahead, swords in front, as if their bodies were weapons themselves thrown toward the battlefield. All of them came for Mia, ignoring the waves of demons that exposed themselves, called by the horde.

  They were Mia’s horde, and she used them. She did not have the reach of a spire, but for several miles in all directions, her music permeated the ground and the sky, until every demon felt its pull. And like shrieking banshees, they ran to Mia and the inevitable battle with the speed of predators.

  Using her open left hand, she pointed a finger at the angels, and the demons attacked. They swarmed, wings, horns, and cws all pouring toward Mia and the oncoming angel battalion. Vinicius, Romakus, and Julisa moved toward the mass, but Mia smmed the base of her staff into the rock beneath her, and they stopped, ripped free of the hypnotizing, silent song.

  She needed them awake and aware. But the demons she did not know, the strangers pulled up from the depths of the rock and stone, would be fodder for the machine of war.

  Livian and the Damall ran up the tunnel, summoned by the horde call, but Vinicius turned and blocked them. How he stopped them, Mia could not see; her attention was elsewhere.

  The tornado above continued to rage and soon it touched down, splitting the approaching angel tide, but even with all the power of its burning madness and screaming wind, the angels did not get swept in its wake. Even if angels truly were weak compared to their betters of the past, they were still a host of deadly powerful entities, and wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. And, in the sky, they abused their God-given privilege, and flew above the demon army. But at least the oncoming tide of the demon horde had given them pause.

  Mia swung her staff upward and called upon the mountain. The mountain listened, and erupted. Rock shot upward in front of her, a colossal spike of bck and red stone, a small mountain in its own right, and it cut through the air as it blocked the incoming servants of Heaven. Hell tore open, rock breaking rock, and the rising yer of new ground sent hellquakes for miles in all directions.

  She needed time for her army to arrive.

  She swung her staff to the side, the ground erupted with a mighty crack that threatened to pop her ears, and va shot up from the cracks into the sky between her and the approaching angels. The geysers died quickly, but the angels at the front of the charging mass stopped, lest they drown in the molten rock. She pyed the song harder, and again, shots of va attacked the sky, turning the angel army into a mess of panicked birds dodging what would have been death, even to a servant of the other half of the Great Tower.

  Was Galon still alive? Did her song hurt him? She couldn’t see him anymore. Yosepha? The angels continued to carry her, high above and in the back of the army, but for some reason, they did not retreat. She could still save her.

  Mia’s new mountain was less a mountain, and more a half bridge that reached high into the air, with a sheer cliff face opposite of Mia, and a ramp on her side of it. And her demon horde used it. The angels compensated quickly, diving around the new mass toward Mia as the va died, but the flood of new demons used the raised ground to meet them in the air.

  Gargoyles; gorgas. Vrats; vratorins. Brutes; devorjins. Tigers; tregeeras. Bats; dilojas. Satyrs; riivas. Minotaurs; borjins. Succubi and incubi, voras and vorins. Even some impas, impins, grems, and gremlins, usually resistant to the horde call, merged into the horde. They all emerged from whatever hunt they were pursuing, left whatever prey they chased, abandoned whatever political games they pyed with each other, and joined Mia’s horde. They swarmed up the ramp, the new bridge that cut into the howling sky several hundred feet, and all demons with wings dove upon the scattered angels.

  The angels roared with defiance, but the demons did not care. Those with wings used the deadly wind and caught the air long enough to catch some angels, and tch onto them. For all an angel’s strength, even they could do not fight against gravity when a dozen imps or grems, or a half dozen gorgas, dangled from their limbs and feathers. Endless wings, a canopy of white and gold, and bck and red, that swirled in the hectic path of the deadly hurricane of fme.

  The wind grew stronger, and what had once been a maelstrom of bending fire twisted upon itself into a tornado. It touched upon the crest of Mia’s new mountain, and grew, ripping the wind apart, twisting pockets of distant air into their own whirlpools of fire. The song beckoned, and the fire sky danced to its tune, reaching down with a dozen more fingers of fme that ebbed and flowed.

  Twelve new bending tubes of amber cloud fell from the sky until they touched the ground and unleashed havoc. Tornadoes of scorching fme flowed around the ramp, and the cut through the swaths of angels as much as the demons. And from the roars that rose to join the battle, the demons lost to the call of the horde were happy to be lost to the madness.

  Angels fell. They either fell to the fire tornadoes that danced with unpredictable beauty, or to the hundreds of demons that used the ramp to take to the sky. Demons could not fly, but the absurd winds grabbed their wings and unched them into the air, sending them into the chaotic flow of a dozen vortexes of fire fighting each other. Like kites guided by madness, they drifted in the air, roared with hunger and bloodlust, and many found angel wings to sink their cws into.

  It was not long before many angels had fallen to the ground, and were engulfed by the demons that could not glide. And the angels in the far back, carrying Yosepha’s cross, slowly fell toward the ground, unable to resist the shrieking, burning wind as Mia pulled the roaring sky down upon them.

  Mia stood, solid, unmoving as the wind tossed her hair. With staff firm against the rock beneath her, she looked behind her. Julisa stood there, eyes wide. Romakus did the same, eyes locked on the chaos before him, the mountainside-turned-battlefield, and the rain of destruction above. Vinicius stood close to Mia, face scanning for any angels that might approach; the one he’d tossed aside was now locked in battle with several other demons.

  “Go,” someone said. Mia said? “Julisa, get Galon. Romakus, get Yosepha.”

  “How the fuck am I going to do that?” they said in unison.

  Mia didn’t respond. She set her eyes back upon the death and madness she had wrought, and reached for the song her fingers pyed within. The ground was her. The sky was her. The song was her. And the demons that swam in her vibrating currents were guests within and upon her.

  And this woman, this young girl with red hair, pale skin, and freckles. She was… Mia was…

  Thoughts were lost to the flowing vibrations. Someone’s voice tried to reach her, but could not, muffled above the surface of the ocean song. Her voice? Her thoughts?

  Julisa ran out across the mountainside along the edge of the battle, around the chaos and screams of death, and around angels that swooped in and about the dozens of nearby demons. Romakus did not go around, but through. He dashed down the mountainside toward the ramp, using his colossal wings to keep from breaking his limbs against the jagged rocks. And upon reaching the new ramp, now soaked in blood and covered in the corpses of demons, he sprinted up.

  An angel got in his way, but Romakus did not waste time. He swung out his sword hard, the mikalim blocked, and the harsh ping of impact announced the strength of the tetrad’s might. The attack unched the angel back, and the tetrad continued past. A half dozen demons followed Romakus and dove at the angel, but she escaped with a fp of her glowing wings. Another angel swooped down, enormous shield at the front, but Romakus bulldozed into them, a full tackle that knocked the angel off the side of the small cliff.

  Higher and higher he rose, not fighting the angels despite their attempts to kill him; he was the only tetrad in the fight, after all, and the biggest target. But it was obvious he’d earned his position as leader of this division of the Damall as even Heaven’s warriors could not stop him, and once he reached the height of the ramp, he dove off. Past Mia’s cliff, she could no longer see the tetrad, and could only hope he could reach Yosepha’s captors.

  The tide of battle had yet to reach Mia, the song pulling the demons toward the fight along and down the mountainside just below her, and the ramp of rock she’d created. But battle was chaos, and the fighting drifted closer, shifting up along the mountain and closer to Mia every minute.

  An angel dove at Mia, sword up. Again, Vinicius knocked them back. He wanted to catch and kill them, and he roared up at them as the warrior took to the sky again, but the angels were smart enough to not commit to a fight with a child of the Old Ones. Unfortunately for the angels, they were not used to the very winds themselves dancing with the unbridled lunacy of fme, and a random gust ripped the angel from their flight path and tossed them into the whirlpool of circling fire tornadoes.

  Mia could not tell if they died or not. All was roars, screams, and insanity. A little piece of her, somewhere above the surface of the ocean, knew that she should feel horrible, and would feel horrible. But those thoughts couldn’t penetrate the vibrations that enveloped her. For now, there was only the song, and the battle.

  Julisa returned, angel on her shoulder. Mia did not look. She aimed her staff out at the battle ahead, and plucked the strings inside her harder, until the depths of the ocean responded in kind, mirroring her song and amplifying it into the world around her. The winds crashed upon them all, and Mia smmed her staff down in front of her to keep from falling over. She ripped a dozen angels from the sky and sent them down into the awaiting cws, swords, and axes of the horde below.

  “Romakus?” Julisa asked, spinning around after setting Galon’s body by the tunnel entrance near Livian.

  “Not back yet,” Livian said.

  The rest of the Damall again tried to join the battle. Livian and Vinicius stopped them. Only the child of the Old Ones and the powerful tetrads were strong enough to resist Mia’s song.

  The battlefield raged, Hell raged, and death flowed. Essence and resonance both fell into the dirt, staining it red, and Hell drank it down. Mia could feel it, the two energies pouring into the depths of Hell, but she could not touch them. Something else was absorbing them. Someone else.

  For all the madness Mia had summoned, the angels would not be so easily defeated. Weakened by time, burdened by millennia, they still ripped through the swaths of demons like paper, and almost all the blood that drowned the nd was demon. The gabriem tended to their fellow angels, healing wounds as the rapholem defended them with grand walls of holy light, gold barriers no demon could break. Adapting to the gale winds, many of the mikalim took to the sky, and unleashed their beams of holy energy down onto the horde.

  Some angels died. Demons died by the hundreds.

  The angel with the crooked wing rose above the battle, aimed her sword at Mia, and screamed with pure fury as she poured her grace into the weapon. It glowed brightly, almost blinding against the swirling amber fmes. And when she unleashed the beam, the battle disappeared under the deafening roar.

  Mia brought up her staff, and summoned bckstone. A wall of onyx shot up from the ground in front of her, fifty feet tall and wide, and ten feet thick. The woman’s attack crashed against it, and a new roar of destruction buried the battlefield as her attack shook the mountain. But this was not the first time Mia had seen one of these attacks, and she built the wall thick. It stood strong.

  The attack didn’t st forever, ten seconds of holy death that chipped away at Mia’s wall like a colossal drill, but could not penetrate it before the angel above desisted. But for all the angel’s crazed fury that made her stand out from the rest of Heaven’s warriors, other angels joined her, took different angles, and again unleashed beams of holy light. Mia aimed her staff to the ground, raised it, and summoned new walls on her left and right, each spread and arcing overhead until a half-complete dome covered her, Vinicius, Julisa, Livian, and the entrance to the cave the Damall stood within.

  The battle continued outside, but more angels joined the assault on Mia, burying her and her demons in the roaring sound of their holy light. She was pinned.

  “Julisa,” she said, “help Romakus. We must rescue Yosepha.”

  Julisa snarled. “I—”

  She snapped her eyes back at the tetrad, and the four-armed demoness grew silent. They stared at each other, Julisa looking for some weakness in Mia’s stance, but Mia stood her ground. Expining her position would have been the logical thing, about how Livian was needed to keep the rest of the Damall from succumbing to the horde call, and how Vinicius was needed to keep Mia safe in case an angel came close. But demons didn’t respond well to logical expnations. They responded well to dominance.

  Snarling, Julisa dashed out from between the walls of bckstone, and disappeared into the madness of the battlefield.

  “Is Galon alive?” Mia asked.

  Livian crouched over the body of the unmoving angel and checked his wounds.

  “Barely.”

  Mia would have snarled, screamed, ground her teeth, something. But all of that was lost to the song, caught in its waves. All that existed was the flowing strings she pyed, and her connection to them and the other thing in the song, mirroring her, amplifying her. Mind buried and flowing in the rapids, it took effort to summon anything other than the most basic thoughts.

  Rescue Yosepha. Save Galon. Stop the angels. Escape. Escape? How were they going to escape? More demons joined her horde, but the song wasn’t strong enough to reach far, or summon the strongest demons nearby. And demons, running as fast as they could to join the fight, couldn’t join her as quickly as she needed. She needed an option, and she needed it now.

  A voice in the song spoke to her.

  Hellfire.

  Mia stared at the bckstone that surrounded her, only barely aware of her own voice, screaming at her from above the surface. Don’t. You’ll kill hundreds. There has to be a better way.

  Mia looked down at her staff, at the hellfire that swirled in the ruby upon its tip. Fire. She needed true fire.

  She pyed the song, and the thing in the ocean, the thing that pulled her along through the currents, the thing that listened to her, spoke to her, it mirrored her. The song carried a thousand emotions, feelings that moved through Mia and drowned her in them, feelings beyond words. Rage, frustration, anger, but also mourning, moroseness, aching, longing, and a million other sister emotions. Whatever it was that listened to Mia’s song, its emotions were too rge and complex for her to understand, but slowly they coalesced from emotion into a single action: destroy.

  And fire was how she, how… Hell, destroyed. Hellfire.

  Mia’s mind and thoughts, lost to the ocean and its currents, paused on a memory. A single memory from her childhood, from the movie The Prince of Egypt, and a particur scene with a tornado of fire. Even as a child, that scene had mesmerized her. It’d been… glorious.

  “Vinicius,” she said. “Defend me.”

  A growl confirmed he would.

  The holy beams came to a stop, and Mia took her chance. She shattered the barriers she’d summoned, each splitting apart with a mighty crack that thundered through the mountains. Raising her staff high, she summoned fire, and this time, it would not come from the sky.

  The mountain trembled. The ground quaked. Hell screamed.

  The distant tornadoes of fire paled compared to the terrible roar of the fme that erupted from the ground. It came quickly, a spiraling array of embers that cut through the rock and stone of Hell, and threw hellfire into the sky, amber mixing with specs of va, and carried upward by the shrieking fme. It was wide, far wider than the walls she’d summoned, and she drew it up directly in front of her close enough the fmes came within a dozen feet of her.

  The other tornadoes ebbed and flowed with the chaos of the wind. But this new tornado that burst through the rock was grounded, controlble, and with a wave of her staff, she guided it forward. Its top, a giant funnel that dwarfed its sister tornadoes, ripped the wind out from under the angels, and their wings betrayed them, dozens of the warriors yanked into the sky and into the fmes.

  Their screams joined the chorus of destruction.

  More than angels were lost to the tornado of hellfire. Demons on the battlefield, lost to their own bloodlust, only avoided the fire as much as needed to continue pursuing battle with the angels. They did not expect the spire of hellfire to tear across the field, ripping up through the ground as it carved a path, and to dance between clusters of combat. They roared into the madness, even as the hellfire reduced them to ash.

  The enormous ramp of rock Mia had summoned ripped apart as the geyser tornado moved through it, splitting the ground and leaving a trail of va in its wake. Bckstone, stained stone, meera metal on demon corpses, all of it was sucked up into the hellfire, doomed to swirl around the edges of the tornado before eventually getting pulled into the deadly fme. Soon, the small mountain, the ramp Mia had summoned to let the demons reach the angels above, shattered entirely, colpsing under its weight as more and more of the stones of its base were ripped away by the hellfire destroying the ground wherever it moved. The myriad of rocks tore upward, broke apart in a mess of collisions that echoed through the battle, and melted as they joined the hellfire.

  Mia stared out onto the field, staff aimed ahead, her focus to guide the hellfire. Romakus. Yosepha. Julisa. The names echoed in her mind, and she held onto them, anchors that stopped her from flowing away with the ocean. Save Yosepha. Do not kill Romakus and Julisa.

  Bck and red wings moved in the distance. Romakus, surrounded by death and angel wings, pushed through the battle, past the fire tornadoes summoned from the sky, past the falling rocks of the destroyed ramp, and around the geyser of hellfire Mia guided. Julisa followed beside him, her four small swords out and sshing at any of the angelic warriors that came too close. She could not defeat an angel, not like this, but it was enough to stop them from blocking Romakus.

  Yosepha was in his arms.

  Why the angels had brought Yosepha, Mia could not understand. But then, why had they pyed music and sung as a choir? What madness had driven them to make such a grandiose and pointless dispy? Maybe they’d thought to prove to Galon the weight of their intentions? Maybe they’d thought a show of strength would convince Mia to simply surrender? Or maybe the angels were simply archaic, and could only operate in methods as ridiculous as a choir announcing their approach, while literally carting around a dispy of their faith to their god.

  Wherever God had gone to, they weren’t here. No one saved the angels as more of them were swept up in the hellfire. No one cared about the demons incinerated by the fmes.

  Mia cared, but the song could not be denied. The silent music drowned her, and her emotions, her desires, were but tiny fish in the waves.

  The angels were quick to adapt. They risked the gale wings and flew higher and higher until their wings brushed the fmes of the burning sky. Yosepha had told Mia they could withstand those fmes, but not easily. Maybe they were retreating?

  No, they weren’t. Gabriem took to the skies and trumpeted their horns, but other angels continued to navigate the maze of fire and death. Rapholem defended each other from the horde, and giant walls of gold fought against the winds and the shards of molten rock they carried. Mikalim dashed about, agile, and unleashed gold beams of light upon the masses, even as several came for Mia yet again.

  She prepared to summon another wall. If she did, she would not be able to see Romakus and Julisa, and would not be able to guide the geyser of hellfire. But the angels did not know that, and they came down to her, swords pointed forward as if they themselves had been thrown at her like spears. Melee combat it was.

  Vinicius stepped in front of her and sshed with his cws. The first angel went down, and while the child of Belial did not penetrate his armor, the angel hit the ground hard enough something inside the shell of silver and gold broke. They took to the sky again, one arm bending the wrong way at the elbow.

  Three other mikalim changed targets from Mia to Vin, and all three set their swords alight with a golden glow. Mia could not watch, eyes locked on the field of fme and the two tetrads running to her, lest she kill them and Yosepha by accident. But the sound of battle raged beside her, and roars of pure bloodlust resonated in her skull as her bodyguard unleashed his new, healed body on the three angels.

  “More!” Livian’s voice. Shadows and feathers announced the arrival of more angels, but Mia dared not risk looking. Not much longer. Romakus and Julisa were maybe thirty seconds away.

  More battle erupted behind her as Livian joined the fight, as well as the rest of the Damall. Maybe the angels hadn’t expected a couple dozen demons to be hiding in the tunnel, but Livian and the others threw themselves into the fray, and the angels that came for Mia’s back found themselves in a new battle. Even lost to the call of the horde, the weaker demons knew to attack the angels and not her.

  Another angel descended on them, a flicker of movement above Mia she couldn’t risk looking to. Another ten seconds. Just another ten seconds.

  Ten seconds too long. The angel reached her, sword glowing, and swung it down.

  The angel missed. Her sword unleashed a golden arc, an extension of her sword that shot forward, and it crashed against the ground beside Mia. Something… Someone collided with the angel midair, and again Mia could not dare risking a gnce as she whipped the hellfire geyser around the field below. The newcomer roared.

  She recognized that roar.

  Julisa rushed forward, shrieking with fury as she unleashed her four swords upon the angels. Romakus held Yosepha to his chest with one arm, while his other swung his colossal sword about. Even with her eyes locked onto the destruction she summoned onto the field, Mia could see in the corner of her eyes how their assault forced the angels to back off.

  No more angels came to join them. Mia released her grip upon her summoned weapon of destruction. The geyser of hellfire roamed free, and the twisting vortex grew fat on the death it wrought, spreading wide until the winds ripped angels from the sky and sent them in all directions. The fire tornadoes merged with the geyser, and the fire sky reached down to meet the ground, a maelstrom of fme and hellfire mixing and rendering the mountainside an inferno.

  As Hell raged, no longer guided by Mia’s song, Mia also ceased the horde call. Had any demons survived? Movement in the Armageddon unfurling before was all a blur, shades of red and bck lost in the fme. Many angels took to the sky, retreating, but far less than there had been before. And as the storm raged, content to sustain itself, more demons and holy warriors disappeared in the fmes, screaming and roaring as it swallowed them.

  It wasn’t stopping. Why wasn’t it stopping?

  Mia spun around and pointed to the tunnel with her staff.

  “Inside!” Was that her voice? It sounded more and more distant. “Julisa, grab Galon!”

  No one argued. The angels took the moment to break free of the battle, including slicing at Vinicius to force him to drop an angel he was about to rip in two, but they retreated as well. A break in the battle, long enough for the demons to react, and they took to the tunnel.

  The horde call was gone, Mia no longer plucking the strings to beckon the demons to attack her enemies, and the entity with her, deep in the ocean of vibrations, did not summon more demons. But it didn’t stop pying the song of the nd, of the burning sky, the tornado of hellfire, of the apocalypse. And it sounded wonderful.

  The Damall ran into the tunnel, Romakus with Yosepha in arm, Julisa with Galon, and Livian pushed back the rest of the Damall. The horde call may have been over, but many of the demons had unleashed their sin auras and were lost to the bloodlust. A powerful aura, nearly two dozen demons desperate to join the fight, and only the tetrads and the child of Belial were strong enough to resist that many auras.

  And the sarkarin who’d saved Mia seconds ago.

  The angel with the crooked wing swooped down again, and three angels followed her, ignoring the retreat of the rest of their army. A rapholem nded directly in front of Mia, blocking her from reaching the tunnel and the Damall and Vin, and before Vinicius could rip them in half, a giant wall of gold light exploded outward. Two other rapholem nded with them, and brought up two more walls of gold, all in Vinicius’s face, sealing him and the other demons in the tunnel, with Mia on the outside.

  Vinicius threw himself against the walls, and they cracked, but did not break. Enough time for the angel with the crooked wing to dive upon Mia, and too close for Mia to summon a wall in time.

  But again the sarkarin demon, an enormous shark beast with a dinosaur body, leapt upon the angel, and brought her to the ground. His eyeless, shark face caught a glint of the gold light of the angry angel woman’s grace, before he buried his teeth onto the woman’s sword arm. She screamed, a mix of rage and pain, and soon blood.

  The sword and shield both disappeared in a small, gold fsh, only for the sword to reappear in her free arm. And as the sarkarin, half on top of her and pinning her to the ground, tore up what he thought was her sword arm, she brought her sword down toward his back.

  Mia reached out, but she was too slow, too te. Another demon wasn’t. Someone else joined the chaos, and with a swing of their bck sword, knocked the angel’s sword aside.

  The loud ping of metal on metal summoned the rapholem. They lowered their walls of gold, and with perfect grace and synchronization, turned and swooped upon their angel companion and the sarkarin and vratorin trying to kill her. Both demons rolled out of the way before angel spears stabbed the ground where they’d been, and gave the furious angel Moriah enough room to get up and take to the sky.

  Kas? Adron?

  Mia’s thoughts were too distant. They didn’t register. She yelled them down at herself through the surface of the ocean, but her other half was too deep. All she could feel from within the currents was the song, the song she’d started and wasn’t even pying herself anymore. Someone else was pying it, and it enveloped her.

  The four angels took to the sky, but Mia wouldn’t let them try again. She pointed a hand up, and unleashed the song. Stab. She wanted to stab them, and she pyed notes that echoed that idea, sharp and penetrating. With staff at her side, she raised her open hand in front of her and drew it upward, as if the ground itself were an extension of her.

  A spiraling spear of bckstone shot up from the ground, nearly as fast as an arrow, and it shot up at the mikalim. The three rapholem could live, but the mikalim woman needed to die. She’d struck Galon, may have killed him, and had tried to kill Mia more than any other angel. Stop her. Kill her.

  Moriah turned around, summoned her shield, and blocked the enormous spear of bck. It shattered against the silver metal, and sparks exploded outward, announced with a thundering crack before raining down harmlessly. How had she seen that coming?

  David. She’d fought David before. Moriah must have run into Yosepha after encountering David, and some sort of exchange tipped her off? But that didn’t expin where the army had come from. Maybe… Azreal, Noah, and Shir? Were they in the army that burned on the mountainside?

  Moriah hovered in the sky, gring down at Mia with red eyes that cut through the shadow of her helmet. Rage could not describe what she saw in the angel’s eyes. What had David done to her? How important had those two angels he’d killed been to her?

  “Death to all unmarked!” Moriah screamed. “I will destroy you! I will rain your blood upon all of Hell!” For a moment, she considered swooping down toward Mia again, even as an inferno raged around them, but the rapholem around her took her arms and pulled her skyward.

  Her screams penetrated the unending roar of the camity until, slowly, she disappeared into the distant ember clouds.

  Mia looked to the demons in the tunnel. Livian, Julisa, and Romakus all stood there, staring at her. Vinicius had his eyes on the sky. The Damall behind Livian had open mouths with dropped jaws.

  And Kasimiro and Adron, both covered in a host of blood that could have only come from fighting on the mountainside, approached her.

  “Mia?” Adron asked.

  Kas. Adron.

  The hum of the song pulled at her. Heat poured, and va leaked up from the geyser of hellfire to roll down the mountainside. The destroyed ground fttened, and the mountainside had become more of a cliff side, much of the rock broken by the tornadoes, the geyser, the summoned and shattered ramp, and the holy beams of light the mikalim had unleashed. The song felt it all.

  New notes joined the song as the inferno raged on. Bones. Ashes. Blood and the red pigment it carried. All were decorations for her body. Hearts. Resonance. Essence. Food for her body, and she devoured them happily.

  The song told its tale, rang in her head, soothed her, and pulled her deeper.

  Slowly, Mia turned to face the inferno. The demons behind her didn’t matter. They were just the life that lived on her skin. But the feast before her was glorious, over a thousand corpses, many burned to cinder, others chopped into pieces for her to absorb. She could taste of them, if she came. If she went deeper, she could drink of them, come home, sit at the table by the fire, and—

  Cws grabbed her shoulder and spun her.

  “Mia!” a vratorin yelled in her face. Half his face was burned, but the wound was old. She knew this vratorin. Right, Adron.

  She stared at him. Why was this vrat stopping her? Let her go so she could explore the feast.

  The sarkarin joined the vratorin, and gred at her with his bck shark face. No eyes, and two horns that came out of the sides of his ft shark head, past his dragon snout, and pointed at her. There was an enormous scar across his chest, under the sb of meera metal covering it.

  That hadn’t been there before.

  Right, because he’d been fighting the rider before, where Mia couldn’t see. When… When…

  The memories buzzed against the surface of the ocean, blurry things in the distance.

  “Mia!” Again the vratorin spoke up, and this time, he shook her. Hard. “Mia, what’re you—”

  The child of Belial grabbed the vratorin and threw him back. The sarkarin… Kasimiro… Kas… jumped between the vratorin… Adron… jumped between Adron and the ragarin, and—

  Gss shattered. Mia’s head broke through the surface of the ocean. Thoughts collided against her, cracked the beautiful, eternal song, and ripped her from its perfect embrace.

  “Vin!” someone yelled. She yelled. She, her, her mouth, her voice. “Don’t hurt them. Don’t—” Batm fshed in her skull, its weight increased, and it sent her mind straight down to the ground. She fell on her ass, and a quick fsh of red light announced to everyone that her armor and staff were gone. “Holy… fuck…” At least she had her potram rune.

  She was going to pass out. She was going to pass out. She was… nope, she was fine. Exhausted, and hungry, but fine. She tried to lean on the staff she didn’t have, nearly face-pnted, and pnted her palm down instead. Her inner fingers no longer pyed the song.

  Then why the fuck was there still a raging inferno happening behind her? She turned around and looked down the mountainside, into the valley of destroyed ground she’d created, and sucked in a hard breath. The hellfire geyser wasn’t stopping. The ground continued to rumble, and the fire continued to swirl in a maelstrom, now revolving around the geyser. And along the outer edges of the vortex — oh god a vortex — new fire tornadoes touched down, spun up from the raging sky.

  Adron and Kas got up, gave Vinicius a few growls, and helped Mia to her feet. Vin growled back down at them, but Mia gave him a quick gnce, and he backed off.

  Weight on her sandals again, she looked at Adron and Kas, and she smiled.

  “You’re alive!” She threw her arms around Adron and squeezed him. Before he could say anything, she did the same for Kas, throwing her arms around his thick neck and giant shoulders, and did her best to hug him, too. “You’re ali—oh no!” Reality hit her like ice water, and she ran past them to Romakus and Julisa, and the two angels they held.

  Romakus sighed down at the angel in his arms, and stepped into the tunnel, Julisa behind him. The rest of the Damall were already in the tunnel, pushed back by Livian again, but they all stared at Mia as she joined them in the cave, Vin, Kas, and Adron behind her. Not fast enough. Mia ran up to Romakus and Julisa, got in front of them, and waved her arms.

  “Are they alive!?”

  They looked at each other and shared a grimace that spoke volumes but didn’t tell Mia a damn thing. But once everyone was safely in the tunnel where the raging inferno outside wouldn’t reach them, they both set their angels along the tunnel wall, and Mia got down on her knees between them.

  “Yosepha!”

  The angel smiled at her, but it was weak, and she lifted her head only long enough to pull it back so it could rest against the rock wall.

  “She’s alive?” Galon asked, before coughing up a spray of blood. His white silks were more soaked than Yosepha’s, a single gash against the side of his neck that flowed blood without end. His wings were drenched red.

  “I’m alive,” she said. “You… You… moron.”

  Galon chuckled and tried to wince with pain, but the effort was too great. He sighed, satisfied, and looked down at himself, his bloody clothes, and the red stream leaking down his neck over his chest.

  “Good,” he said, smiling softly.

  “Why’d you do that!?” Mia yelled, gring at Galon. With each moment, the angel grew blurrier, and Mia sucked in a breath as she wiped the tears from her eyes. “You… You’re hurt, and… and…” She looked back, and regretted it immediately. Yulia stood there behind Julisa’s leg, staring at Galon.

  “I didn’t think… Moriah would do that. My bad.” Again he ughed, and again it stopped short as another spsh of blood fell out of his mouth.

  “You can… heal yourself, right?” Mia came in closer and grabbed the man’s shoulder on his good side. “Gabriem can heal themselves. You can heal yourself, right?”

  Galon didn’t answer, smile unending.

  Yosepha reached out and touched Galon on the same shoulder, and her hand fell a moment ter.

  “Azoryev,” she said, “is… growing fanatical. I didn’t know they’d respond this way, and when I ran into Moriah on the way back to the vortex, only to meet a battalion informed by Azreal, Shir, and Noah, I—” It was her turn to cough and sputter.

  Yulia crawled over to them, knelt beside Galon, and put her cws on his legs as she leaned in.

  “You’re an angel. You’ll be fine, right?”

  Galon’s smile did not falter. Yosepha faltered for him, looking away and grimacing. In any other world, any other circumstance, everyone nearby would have gone silent as the grim reality sank in, but demons were demons and they didn’t do remorse. The tetrads, Vinicius, Kas, Adron, they stood in silence, looking down at the two angels as they waited, but the rest of the Damall chatted among themselves about what they were going to do now. Except Yulia.

  The bat dy pnted herself beside Galon, faced him, and touched his wound. Galon didn’t have the energy to so much as groan. Even among the sound of snarling demons arguing with each other, Yulia’s whimper cut through Mia’s guts.

  “You’ll be fine!” Yulia said, and she stroked Galon’s crimson wing. “You’ll be fine.”

  Mia didn’t like remorse, mourning, the pain of losing someone you cared about. No one did, but it wasn’t something she’d ever experienced. Fictional stories she’d read had been enough to scar her for life, but she’d never had a family except her brother. Except, maybe, Hannah…

  There was that funeral, that one time, but neither David nor Mia had really cared about the deceased. David had shut down hard after that, and it’d taken weeks before he talked again, but that’d been because of something else. And that something else was happening right here in front of Mia, and she tried to look away from Yulia before the same thing happened to her.

  She couldn’t look away.

  The demons barked at each other about the battle they’d missed out on, until Romakus silenced them with a roar and swing of his wing.

  “The inferno continues,” Julisa said, “and the angels have fled. We’re safe for the moment.” She joined the rest of the Damall and pushed the small crowd back down into the tunnel, away from the two angels and the crying demon. “But Tacitus will be here soon to investigate, and he will not come alone.”

  “I know,” Romakus said, “I know.”

  “Then you should—”

  “I know! Just, give us a moment, Julisa.”

  The four-armed bitch frowned at her leader, but agreed and continued guiding the rest of the Damall back down the tunnel. They were probably going to the big cavern with the stagmites, where they’d had their meeting about what to do with Mia and the leash.

  Yulia stayed. Livian reached for her, but Romakus blocked her hand.

  “Azoryev,” Galon said, “is going to be a problem. If they”—more coughing—“keep hunting for you like this, Mia. They don’t know mercy.”

  “Were those three angels you saved me from, from Azoryev?” Mia asked.

  “No,” Yosepha said. “They’re from Ravid, same as I. They must have spoken with someone from Azoryev, and they responded with… preparation.”

  “Azoryev must be watching the vortex,” Galon said. “They… probably spoke with them after I left. The—” Again, the man erupted into coughs, but with no energy, they were sad, weak things, and blood bubbled on his lips. “The Azoryev council will convince the others to act, after this.”

  “Then we’ll convince the council,” Yosepha said, and she set her hand on his leg. Her blood leaked from her punctured wrist down to join his. “We—”

  “Make sure she eats my heart,” Galon said, and he set his perfect, bronze eyes on Romakus. “She can’t go back to Heaven. And she needs resonance.”

  “I won’t!” Yosepha yelled. Tried to yell. Her muscles clenched down, and she squeezed the white silk of his clothes, earning more blood from her punctured wrist, but her voice was weak. “I won’t.”

  Galon smiled at her, his perfect, warm smile, and winked at her. All Yosepha could do was look down and bite back quiet sobs as tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Yulia,” Galon said, slowly turning his head to her. “Keep on an eye on Mia for me, would you?”

  “You keep an eye on her!” Yulia grabbed the man’s shoulders with her wing cws and leaned in close. Very close. “You do it!”

  “Sorry, I don’t think… I’ll be able to.”

  “You do it! You do it! You…”

  “Hey,” he said. “Kiss me.”

  Sniffling, tears running down her cheeks, too, the bat demon leaned in, and kissed the angel.

  She pulled back. Galon smiled, and his head lulled forward.

  His smile never faded.

  Yulia broke into sobs and hugged the angel with her wing arms. Without looking, she lifted her arm, and gently ran two cws down his face to close his eyes.

  This wasn’t happening. Not again.

  Mia looked back at Adron, but his eye was pointed downward, like he couldn’t bear to look, like it reminded him of what it was reminding Mia of. But when Yulia’s sobs broke into high-pitched squeaks, Mia looked back, and stared. The fingers inside her pyed the strings, hit them hard again, and again, something in the ocean of vibration answered her.

  She got up and walked toward the exit.

  “Mia?” Adron asked after her. “Mia?”

  The voice was distant, muffled. It didn’t matter. The vibration mattered. The ocean mattered. It listened to her, her emotions, and it would do what she wanted. It would dance to her song.

  “I’m going to… kill them all…” That was what she wanted. A simple, direct thought that resonated inside the vibration. A perfect song. Kill them all. She was going to kill them all.

  The ocean welcomed her. It soothed her, knew her pain, her sadness, echoed them, and lifted her up like a friend, hugging her as she mented. Deep underneath the waves where no one else could feel but her, the song told her everything would be alright, and that it would help her do whatever she wanted. Home. All she had to do was step outside, call upon it, and—

  A set of cws grabbed her shoulders again, and shook her until her head bounced back and forth hard enough for whipsh. Big hands, big cws. Kas’s cws.

  “Mia!” he yelled.

  Mia froze, again pulled up out of the vibration. It didn’t feel good, like stepping out of a hot shower into a bitterly cold room, but she couldn’t ignore the voice she knew, so familiar and intimate and… concerned?

  Kas? Concerned?

  “I’m… okay,” she said, slowly turning around and facing the group again. “I’m okay. I’m… okay.” Deep breaths.

  They eyed her for a minute, clearly not believing her.

  “Kasimiro,” Romakus said, and he chuckled with his usual chaotic smile. But the chuckle and smile both faded, far more quickly than they would have yesterday. “Faust told me you’d left the spire.”

  Kas stepped to the side, stood by the tunnel wall, and crouched down into his usual squatting perch so he could put weight onto his palms on the ground. The scar on his chest was massive and had burn marks along its edges. No need to ask. The rider had done that.

  In typical Kas fashion, he said nothing. He’d get along with Vinicius.

  “We both left,” Adron said, and he stood beside Mia. “What’s going on? That’s Romakus, leader of the Damall. You know him?”

  “I… do. Sorta. Vinicius and I are trying to get to False Gate, and then angels attacked us, and the Damall saved us.”

  “Angels.” Adron looked to Yosepha, Galon’s body, Yulia, and back to Yosepha before he sucked in a breath. “You’re an angel?”

  Yosepha slowly tore her gaze away from Galon, and gred up at the vrat. Her fingers were interlocked with the dead man’s.

  “Yes.”

  “Your wings?”

  “Azoryev crucified me. They cut off my wings, and nailed me to a cross of truth.”

  “Cross of truth?” Mia asked.

  “It’s… a way Heaven can force angels to… speak. A relic from the time of Ramiel’s betrayal.” She shivered, and her eyes fell. “It hasn’t been used in… in… thousands of years. But Azoryev was ready. They… suspected me, and Galon. Suspected us all along, because of how often we visit Hell. They…”

  Romakus growled deep in his chest and squatted down in front of Yosepha.

  “Who did it to you? Which angels specifically?”

  Sighing, Yosepha shook her head, and set a bloody hand on the huge demon’s shoulders.

  “You will not find the specific angels, Romakus. Besides, Azoryev is—”

  “Mostly dead,” Adron said, “if those angels out there were all from Azoryev. Speaking of… can someone tell me what’s going on? A horde call was sent out, a small one, but it still got its hooks in me, and before I knew it I was running toward a fucking angel army, and there was fire everywhere, and—”

  Mia pat Adron on the stomach, smiled up at him, and shook her head.

  “I’ll expin everything ter. I’m just… I’m just so gd you’re alive.” She wrapped her arms around him, and buried her face in his stomach. Bigger than most vrats, Adron stood eight feet tall, but that was short enough she could hug him. “You saved me.”

  “I… I guess I did. That horde call was telling me one thing: kill the angels. And it was coming… from you?”

  She nodded, forehead rubbing against his sternum.

  “Y-Yeah.”

  “Though, without Kas, I’d have run right into that inferno instead.”

  “Kas.” Her arms fell from Adron, half going limp as she sighed and drifted toward the big shark dinosaur. If there’d been a corner, he’d have been sitting in it, just like he did when he was her bodyguard, and she managed a weak chuckle as she came up to him.

  With him in his squatting perch position, she was face to face with Kas, and she smiled at him as she reached out and set her hands on his horns.

  “You lived,” she said.

  “So did you,” he said, in his typical rumbly grumbly way. Unlike Vinicius, there wasn’t any sinisterness to his dark, growly voice. That wasn’t Kas. Kas was a bitter old man in a demon’s body. And she liked this bitter old man.

  She walked in closer to him, and put her face into the nook of his shoulder and neck so she could hug him.

  “I thought the rider might have killed you, until Faust told me you and Adron left the spire.”

  He rumbled, a nice one, and he didn’t push her away, either. If she knew Kas, and she liked to think she understood him a little, he was happy to see her.

  “You have a new scar,” she said.

  “You have new clothes,” he said.

  “Oh. Right.” She rubbed her forehead into his neck a few times before looking herself up and down. “So much has happened in just the past few weeks. I… I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “You can tell them ter,” Romakus said. “We’re leaving.” He scooped up Yosepha again, set her in the nook of his arm so she rested against his chest, and he made down the tunnel. “Let’s talk with the others. Livian, get Galon’s heart.”

  “No,” Yosepha said. “You… You can’t.”

  “You heard him, Yosepha. Respect a man’s dying wish.”

  The wingless angel sighed, but didn’t argue anymore. She set her cheek on Romakus’s shoulder, went limp, and gnced back to Galon, and the bat dy still sitting beside him. Romakus didn’t let the scene drag, taking Yosepha down into the tunnel. It was better if she didn’t see this, and they both knew it.

  Livian squatted down beside Yulia, and pulled her off him. Gently. Mia stared, blinking, as the ten-foot demoness treated the little demoness with kindness. It was paralyzing. Yulia turned into Livian, clicked at her a few times, rubbed her eyes on Livian’s shoulders, and ran down the tunnel, half gliding with her speed. She wanted to get away.

  Livian set a hand on Galon’s shoulder, kissed his forehead, and ripped out his heart.

  An angel heart. It didn’t glow, or have special gold lines, or anything that gave it away as an angel heart, except that it was a little bigger than a human’s. But Vin, Adron, and Kas stared at the hunk of bleeding flesh in the woman’s palms, and licked their lips. There was a lot of power in angel hearts, and a lot of souls in Hell were convinced if you ate one, you got special powers. A tempting meal.

  Livian gave everyone a gre, and nodded down the tunnel.

  “Come on,” she said, and followed after her boss, heart in hand.

  “I am beyond confused,” Adron said.

  “As am I,” Kas said, growling as he inched a little closer to Galon’s body. “What happened?”

  “Vin,” Mia said, “can you join the others down in the tunnel?” She almost said please, but that’d only decrease his chances of doing what she asked, especially with other demons nearby to witness possible weakness.

  The colossus growled in his throat, shared a couple gnces with two much smaller demons, and left. Kas and Adron watched after him, probably waiting for Vinicius to run back and eat them, but he didn’t. He disappeared down the tunnel.

  “I can’t believe you guys are alive!” Mia almost jumped and cpped, but the spsh of angel blood under her sandals ripped the idea out through her guts. Sighing, she ran a hand down Adron’s shoulder, the burned side, and up it to touch his face. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.” He winked at her with his only eye. It’d have looked like a blink, if not for how he scrunched up the muscle of his good eyebrow. “It can’t look too good, though.”

  “It looks… Well, I mean, it’s not ugly! You look good!” She smiled up at him and pat him on the chest. Demons healed a little differently than people did. The burn marks covering half his body didn’t look like nasty scar tissue, but an array of swirling scorch marks, dark red against the near bck parts of his skin.

  The sad part was how the burn covered a piece of his face, namely over one of his eyes. That eyelid would probably never open again.

  “That’s good. I’d hate it if your new friend was the reason I looked ugly.”

  She chuckled, weak and soft, but it felt nice to ugh, to do anything that didn’t mean staring down at Galon’s body, or think about the things she’d just done.

  “You summoned the horde?” he asked. “Like a spire would?”

  “I… did, yeah. Not nearly as strong as a spire call, I figure, but… I did.”

  “And the clothes?”

  “An angel rune. They have a few, and apparently I can use them. Did you see me in the bck armor?”

  “I did.” He squatted in front of her, nodding as he looked up at her. “And all the fire outside? That… geyser, shooting out of the ground? The little mountain?”

  “Destroyed little mountain,” Kas said. “All your doing?”

  “I… I mean… I guess? I don’t really know for sure. I just… pyed the strings, those things that I can feel, that let me create auras. When I saw Galon get hurt, I pyed them super hard, because I knew I had to save him and Yosepha, and…” And she failed.

  “Did you know him well?” Adron asked.

  “Not really. I only talked to him a few times, but he was… he was a gabriem, and really, really nice. And smart. And… And just…” She forced herself to look. She had to look. It wasn’t her fault, and she would not carry the guilt, no matter how much she wanted to. But she still had to look.

  She stood over the corpse of the angel, reached down, touched his crimson wing, and bit down a sob. But another hit her, summoned by the wet texture of the angel’s blood soaking her fingertips.

  “Romakus is right,” Kas said. “Tacitus will come investigate. We need to leave.”

  Mia didn’t answer, eyes locked on Galon’s closed eyes, but somehow she managed to not look down at the hole in his chest. Livian had been surgical removing his heart, limiting damage to his body, but there were only so many ways you could remove a heart from a corpse with your cws.

  “We didn’t expect to run into you like this,” Adron said, “but we did. So, what’s the pn?”

  A spark of energy shot up through her limbs. Slowly, Mia turned and smiled at the two of them.

  “You want to come with me?”

  “After what happened at the spire?” Adron ughed and shrugged. “Damn right.” Much as he tried to keep eye contact with her, he looked down for a second, a flicker that waved a fg over his head. He was thinking about Hannah.

  “When David and I fell out of the spire,” she said, “a gorga he knows saved us, but she couldn’t get us out of the canyon until someone who… who looks a lot like the rider saved all three of us. A woman, in aera armor.” Adron and Kas traded gnces; Kas did it without eyes, of course. She continued. “She told me I need to get to the Forgotten Pce, or… or we’re all dead.”

  Silence, with a constant, healthy dose of raging rumbles from outside. The storm continued.

  “All dead?” Adron asked.

  “All dead. And whoever the woman was, she knew what she was talking about. Vin confirmed. So, we’re heading to False Gate, ‘cause we think we can get across the sea from there.” Nodding, she stood up, got one step down the tunnel to follow after Romakus, and then turned around. Past the curve of the tunnel, the inferno raged, and the music called to her. Beside her, Galon’s corpse sat, doomed to melt away to a skeleton in a couple of days.

  She leaned down, kissed his forehead where Livian had, and left him. Kas and Adron followed.

  Adron got beside her, Kas behind her, and they fell into a natural rhythm. It was almost like she hadn’t lost them.

  Lost them? Powerful word choice there, Mia. They’re not yours.

  “You really did all that?” Adron asked, gesturing back. “Only reason I didn’t run into those fire tornadoes to start a fight with an angel was Kas. He resisted the horde call.”

  She smiled back at the huge shark dinosaur, and he snorted once, walking close to her on all fours, using his long arms to easily pnt some weight on his palms. It wasn’t the same walking style as a tregeera, who walked like cats when they went on all fours, but more like someone had crossed a crocodile with a goril. Big arms for bracing the ground, but with a long tail that flowed behind him.

  As awesome as Adron was, bigger and stronger than most vrats, he wasn’t on quite the same level as a sarkarin like Kas. But still, it was a surprise Kas resisted the horde call, when everyone else had succumbed except the tetrads and Vin.

  “I guess I did,” she said, “but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to save Galon and Yosepha.”

  “You guess?”

  “Yeah, guess. I… don’t know how I did it. But I can still… still hear the song. It’s what’s causing all that chaos outside. It’s… a song I created.”

  Adron sucked in a breath. “Holy shit.”

  “You were in a trance,” Kas said.

  “I… I think you’re right,” she said. “I was in a trance. The song is… it wrapped me, and it felt so… comfortable. It felt like… like…” Home? “Thanks for stopping me. I don’t know what I was going to do.”

  “Think you can do more of that stuff?” Adron asked. “If we’re going on a journey across Hell, those are some pretty useful abilities.”

  “I don’t know. And if I get pulled into a trance doing it, I…” She rubbed her arms, and stepped a little closer to Adron. “I don’t know.”

  “Being careful makes sense,” he said. “You must have killed dozens of angels, maybe hundreds. And far as I saw, nearly every demon that answered the horde.”

  “I didn’t—” She bit her lip and shook her head. “Fuck. I didn’t know… I didn’t know any of that would happen. I mean, I did, and I didn’t. I just… I just pyed the song, and I knew what would happen when I did. But it was all… so in the moment. I didn’t realize… I didn’t…”

  Adron mirrored her expression, and he looked down as he stroked a horn. They walked in silence for a bit, and even as they went deeper into the depths, the rumbling of tornadoes outside shook the mountain. The hellfire tornado that came up from the ground and merged with the sky wouldn’t hit the mountain, she knew. How she knew, she didn’t know, but she knew they were safe.

  The three of them stepped into the giant cavern, and the Damall stared at her. Romakus stood to the side of the group, and he squatted down in front of Yosepha as the angel struggled to sit upright, back against a giant stagmite. She’d live.

  She was going to hate Mia for all the dead angels. All that, and Galon still died. All that, and Yosepha was still barred from Heaven. All that, and… nothing.

  Livian gave her the heart and joined the rest of the group in a big circle. They waited for Romakus, and the gorujin shared a few quiet words with Yosepha before joining them, too.

  Vinicius stood closest to the tunnel Mia had come from, set his dragon eyes on Kas and Adron, and growled quietly. Better than pouncing and killing them.

  Romakus fred his wings, a signal for the group to quieten, and he paced in the center of the circle as he hooked them to his back.

  “We’re leaving,” he said, “today.” No one said a thing, eyes flitting between him and Mia. “At first I wasn’t quite sure what to do, if we should really just believe this little girl and her crazy story. But…” He gestured up at the ceiling of the cavern. “I think it’s safe to say we should take this seriously. The angels think killing the unmarked is worth a fucking battalion, and now they’ll send more the next time they find an unmarked. I can’t bme them, considering what she did.”

  “They didn’t know about her abilities,” Yosepha said, “when they gathered that army. Azoryev were looking for a reason, any reason, to come to Hell with violence. After the unmarked appeared, and the council decreed they were to be exterminated, it was only a matter of time before they decided scouting parties weren’t enough.” Even with big puncture holes through her ankles and wrists, Yosepha dragged herself around the stagmite enough to face the group. Still in her potram clothes, she was a bloody mess, and it only grew worse as Galon’s heart sat in her palm. She’d taken a single bite.

  “Azoryev do that a lot?” Julisa asked.

  “They… did.” Yosepha looked down at the heart in her hand, and stared at it. “They’ve been looking for a battle to join for millennia. They thrived during the Second War, but since then, Heaven has done little in Hell. Even during the Spire War, we did little, and let the spires fight among themselves.”

  “Except Belor,” Vinicius said. He didn’t bother looking the angel’s way.

  “Except Belor,” Yosepha said, nodding. “But that was a small battle. If Heaven truly wanted, she could—”

  “Could what?” After a quick snarl that yanked Yosepha's head up, Vinicius marched toward her. Romakus got in his way, but Vinicius just looked over the ten-foot-tall tetrad’s head to gre down at the angel. “Heaven is a shell of her former self. You can’t summon the numbers you could.”

  Yosepha gred up at the child of Belial with something dangerously close to hate in her eyes.

  “You don’t understand Heaven, and I have no intention of expining her to you.”

  Vinicius snorted, straight down into Romakus’s face. It’d take more than that to scare Romakus though, especially with all his Damall ready to jump Vinicius if he stepped out of line. He stood his ground and snorted back up at the ragarin.

  “The point is,” Romakus said, “that Heaven’s gone on the offensive, and they’re absolutely convinced the unmarked need to die. Azoryev may be quick on the draw, but after what happened here today, I’m guessing the other Heavenly Isnds will join this witch hunt, and we’re going to have entire armies of angels pouring over Hell looking for the unmarked.”

  “Not to mention Tacitus,” Adron said. “He’ll be on his way, with at least a few hundred demons, and not some random horde, either. His best. And Diogo might do the same.” Everyone looked his way, but Adron shrugged like he’d always been a member of the Damall. Men like him, who could just seamlessly merge into any group, were simultaneously infuriating and delightful.

  “Diogo is just a devorjin, a brute,” Livian said. “He’s the weakest spire ruler in the history of Hell. Do we really fear him?”

  “Don’t underestimate Diogo,” Kas said. And just when everyone went silent to listen to the shark dinosaur finally speak, he said nothing more.

  “Either way,” Romakus said, “we’re leaving. Now. We got a few days before the angels that survived Mia’s horde and inferno get back to Heaven, but after that, who knows what the fuck will happen. Yosepha?”

  The angel slowly nodded, eyes still locked on the angel heart in her palm.

  “The council will have a meeting, but they will surely side with Azoryev. Each of the Heavenly Isnds will send a battalion, and a thousand scouting parties, each. More, if they decre war. The scouts will fetch the armies the moment they know where an unmarked is, and they will raze the nd.”

  “Mia can do that on her own, apparently,” Romakus said. He gave Vinicius one st gre before he stepped around him and squatted in front of Mia. “Right?”

  “I uh… I… don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” His tone was angry, and both Adron and Kas stepped a little closer. Romakus didn’t so much as gnce at them, or behind him, despite how Vinicius slowly came up to stand near the tetrad’s tail.

  “I don’t know. I did something, inside, and it pulled me under, and then things started responding to me. I’m not… under, right now, and I… don’t know how to do it again.”

  Romakus stood up, growled at the three demons ready to jump him, and resumed pacing in the middle of the gathering. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, with more eyes falling on Mia each second, the tetrad squatted down in front of Yosepha again.

  “We need to know what you told them.”

  Yosepha didn’t respond, eyes locked on the heart.

  “Yosepha,” Livian said. “We—”

  Romakus fred a single wing in his fellow tetrad’s direction, and she shut up, lowering her head and backing away.

  “Yosepha,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  The tenderness in his voice struck the entire room more silent than his barks or roars did.

  “You can’t resist the cross,” she said. “And… they asked me… what I knew.” She shook her head, cradled Galon’s heart in her two hands against her legs, and sucked in a hard breath. “They know the Damall will help Mia try to reach False Gate. They know the unmarked can use angel runes, if taught. They know they can create auras, and read the ancient nguage.”

  Mia ran over to the angel and got on her knees in front of her. Broken. The poor woman looked broken.

  “Yosepha,” Mia said, and she put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.” The words sounded so pointless and futile, but they were out before Mia could stop them. Useless, meaningless words that’d piss anyone off. She might as well have told Yosepha ‘I understand your pain’.

  But Yosepha didn’t yell at her, didn’t sh out, nothing. She met Mia’s gaze, summoned a small smile from somewhere crushed and buried, and lowered her eyes again.

  “I didn’t tell them anything else about you, Mia,” the angel said. “I… resisted… And they thought…” She shook her head, another tiny smile sneaking across her lips before vanishing. “They had enough information. And then they… took me… to make sure…” A sob worked its way up her throat, but she bit it down. “Three days, hanging on that cross… And… And I couldn’t—”

  Romakus stood up and gestured to the Damall.

  “We’re leaving. Now. Get anything you think you need and meet us at the exit. Ten minutes.”

  Mia hadn’t even noticed, but every demon was looking at Yosepha now. Not Mia, but the wingless angel. Romakus’s words cut through their almost hypnotized gaze, though, and they walked past Adron and Kas out of the cavern to their alcoves. Some of them had more pieces of armor, maybe some weapons, maybe a trophy or two they felt comfortable carting around Hell. Whatever, anything to get them to stop looking at Yosepha.

  Once they were all gone, Yosepha let the sounds out, and Mia stroked her shoulder. The stactites and stagmites broke up the sound so it wouldn’t echo too much, but Romakus, Mia, Vin, Adron, and Kas, all got to hear a broken angel cry. If she’d been alone, free to scream, her cries would have ripped Heaven open, and it wasn’t long before Mia teared up, too. She sat beside her, slipped an arm around behind Yosepha along her lower back, and half hugged her as more tears trickled down the angel’s cheeks. It wasn’t long before Mia’s arm was soaked in blood.

  Adron kept his eye on the ground until a few minutes had gone by, and Yosepha’s sobs had quietened, before he walked up and joined them.

  “Are… we coming?” he asked. “Kas and I just showed up. Can’t really presume to, but I figured… we don’t have anywhere else to go. We don’t trust Diogo, and we’d like to help Mia if we can.”

  Romakus and Mia traded a quick gnce before the tetrad stood up and faced the two.

  “Yeah, alright. But you listen to me, understand? This is my cut of the Damall. If you travel with us, you do what I tell you to.”

  Adron nodded. Kas grunted. What could have been a huge negotiation that’d have taken hours, took Romakus seconds. He had the ‘survives by his instincts’ sort of personality, and considering how long he’d been alive, it’d served him well.

  “I know him”—Romakus gestured to Kas—“but I don’t know you. Can I trust this vratorin, Mia?”

  “Yes.” It was out of her mouth before she could think about it, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Saying it too fast kind of made it sound like a lie, and Romakus eyed her for a second before he gave Adron the same stink eye. Better he didn’t know Adron used to be one of Zel’s agents.

  His gre didn’t st. He scooped Yosepha up into his arms again, eyed everyone, and left.

  “He’s… normally more… combative, and chaotic,” Mia said, getting back up and joining her friends. “Be careful with Romakus.”

  “I guess I will,” Adron said. When Kas looked to Vin with his eyeless gaze, Adron set his one eye on the titan as well before looking back to Mia. “You really have his leash.”

  “Y-Yeah, but Vin is helping because he trusts the dy in armor. If she says an unmarked needs to get to the Forgotten Pce or everyone dies, he believes her. And Romakus is okay with me holding onto the leash, ‘cause he believes it, too. Vin’s my bodyguard.”

  Adron frowned, traded gnces with his eyeless companion, and stepper closer as he looked up at Vin.

  “Then why the leash?” he asked, eye still on Vin.

  “Why?” Mia asked.

  “If Vin is helping of his own choice, why the leash?”

  “Well, I mean… I uh…”

  Vinicius released a long, deadly growl, heavy enough Mia felt it in her toes, but he didn’t answer. Walking past the two demons and into the tunnel to join the others was answer enough.

  “He’s dangerous,” Kas said, moving to stand closer to Mia. “Without the leash, he’d probably kill us all.”

  “I don’t know,” Mia said. “He’s not all that bad. I mean, yes, he’s ultra violent, but he’s not… not… He’s not like Zel, you know?”

  Kas grumbled, and Adron snorted. They didn’t like Vin, and Adron had a good reason not to.

  “Come here,” Mia said, and she held out her arms.

  Adron ughed, squatted in front of her, and she again hugged him and buried her face in his shoulder.

  “I was so worried you’d died, after that canyon opened up and ruined everything.”

  “Nearly did.”

  “And you!” She grabbed one of Kas’s horns and pulled him in. Of course, the demon was way too heavy for her to pull, but he came closer anyway, and she hugged him, too. “You fought the rider.”

  “I did.”

  “That scar is huge. He nearly killed you?”

  “He did. Diogo lost his arm.”

  “I saw.” Sighing, she rubbed her forehead in his neck. And he let her. Why was he letting her?

  Don’t jinx it thinking about it. Just accept it. Adron and Kas were happy to see her, and she was more than happy to see them.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  “This is Adron,” she said as she picked up her egg and put it in her shoulder sling. “And this is Kasimiro.” The group already knew their names, but this felt like a proper introduction. A ‘hey we’re about to leave on a journey, let’s exchange names’ sort of situation.

  The Damall, all standing beside each other in the tunnel, shared some quiet grunts and growls as they looked Kas and Adron up and down. It was a wonder they didn’t snuff their butts.

  “Hi,” Adron said, and he waved at the group.

  Kas snorted.

  “They were my bodyguards when I was Zel’s prisoner. They left the spire when Diogo took over; he doesn’t like them very much. They’ll be joining us!”

  That got some more grumbles from the Damall, and some nasty gres, too. Livian stepped forward and looked down at the two men, all four arms folded across her chest.

  “I like… him,” she said, and she licked her lips as she grinned at Adron.

  “Understandable,” he said. “I’m very attractive.”

  She ughed. Romakus didn’t. Surprising. It was the sort of silly, chaotic, fun, dumb comment he thrived on.

  The winged tetrad stood ahead of the group at the tunnel exit, Yosepha still in his arms but out of sight since the big guy’s wings were in the way. Yosepha. She was the reason Romakus had agreed so quickly to let Kas and Adron come. Everything was different now, and her life was on the line just as much as everyone else’s.

  It was so damn romantic the way he held the angel, it made Mia squirm. Why couldn’t the boys who liked her be like that? Adron was a pyboy. Kas was a grumpy old man. Vin was a… a… bit of a question mark, but there was no denying how much the demon loved violence and mayhem.

  “There’s another group of Damall on the Bck Valley border,” Romakus said, looking over his shoulder. “It’ll take a week to reach them, and probably longer since we’re avoiding Tacitus, and angels. So strap in and get ready to walk.” All the demons groaned. No demon liked walking long distances. “Mia, you created the firestorm outside. You can’t stop it?”

  “N-No, I… I don’t think I can.”

  “Can you get us around it?”

  “I mean, maybe?”

  She sucked in a breath, joined Romakus at the head of the group, and clutched her neckce. Vin followed behind her, and so did Adron and Kas, and Julisa and Livian. A bit chaotic, everyone finding a pce to walk, but the demons all slipped into a groove once they were outside.

  The storm raged on. The burning sky swirled, circling the hellfire vortex, fire tornadoes above merging with the geyser of va and fme. The wind burned. She hadn’t noticed it during the fight, but now she had to lift a hand and block it from hitting her eyes. The demons didn’t, the heat not bothering them at all.

  They were supposed to get moving, but everyone stared out over the side of the mountain, down to the valley Mia had created. It used to be a giant slope, but the geyser had leveled it, leaving broken ground and molten rock in its wake, canyons that glowed, hinting at the running va deep within.

  She, and the song, had permanently changed the ndscape, and as far as she could tell, the song had no intention of stopping. It no longer changed, not guided by Mia’s fingers anymore, but it continued nonetheless.

  “I… can tell the storm isn’t going anywhere,” she said. “Maybe it will, with time, but for now, it’s not going anywhere. And the hellfire… geyser… won’t move. We can just go around it.”

  Easier said than done. The tornado was wide, the storm much wider, and getting around the mountain would be easiest along the slope that no longer existed.

  “A mini vortex,” Vinicius said, gesturing to the hellfire.

  “You’ve seen the False Gate vortex?” Adron asked.

  The titan nodded. “A hundred times bigger than this.”

  A hundred times? Jesus christ.

  “Come on,” Romakus said. “If you trust the hellfire to not suddenly whip across the ground and incinerate us all, then we’re going through the storm.”

  “Through?” Julisa asked. “I—”

  Whatever argument she had, it disappeared in the howling wind as the group followed Romakus into the inferno. Whatever his reason, Romakus wasted no time, forged ahead with something a little faster than a fast walk, and it wasn’t long before Mia had to jog to keep up.

  “Romakus! Slow down! I’m—” She squeaked as a hand picked her up.

  Vinicius. The titan growled at her, and Mia blinked up at him. He wanted to say something, but ground his teeth instead, rumbled in his giant chest, and set her on his back with a little more speed than expected. She squeaked again as she grabbed some of his back spikes, but she found a groove to rest on, not squash her egg, and hide her face from the burning wind.

  Kas and Adron both gnced back at her, and Adron fell in beside Vinicius so he could look up at her. She smiled at him, silently telling him this was okay, and he frowned but nodded.

  It was okay, but it wasn’t exactly normal. Vin had grabbed her and put her on his back without any word from her, and that just wasn’t Vin. Being possessive? Maybe. In any other circumstance, that might have been kinda endearing, maybe even hot, but it hit a little differently when the person — or demon — being possessive was both a deadly killer, and enjoyed killing.

  It was something she could worry about ter. For now, she put her cheek to the back of his shoulder, face turned out to face the inferno.

  Bones. There were bones everywhere, with pieces charred bck, and others still covered in sizzling bits of flesh. Chunks of bck metal covered some of them, and combined with the horns on skulls, it was clear most of the skeletons were demon. But not all of them. The human skeletons were naked, and the skeletal remains of their wings gave them away. And not every corpse was completely bone. More than a few of them were only partly charred, with other parts sizzling and popping, naked flesh. Demon, and angel.

  It was a horror show.

  “I did this,” she said. No one heard.