bedeviled & beyond 04 - bedeviled & belittled (18 page)

I closed my eyes, praying for strength.
Darma
?

Why am I still here?

Good Lord! I’m trying, Darma.

Maybe Aunt Myra would be more successful. So far you just suck.

My eyes widened. Myra! Oops!
I gotta go, Darma. We’ll be there to get you shortly.

Wai—!

I switched mental paths, looking for Dialle.
Hey! I need to pop out for a minute, can I borrow Frick and Frack?

I could feel his frown in my mind.
Who
?

My guards, the ones you saddled me with earlier.

You mean Darielle and Omnus? The guards who saved your virtue and possibly your life with Nerul?
He reminded me none too subtly.

I rolled my eyes, Dialle could be such a drama queen.
Yeah, them.

I don’t want you gallivanting around in this circle, Astra. We’re very close to the fiery pits here. The temperature is over five thousand degrees in the shade. If you stepped outside by accident you’d be ash before you managed to take a full breath.

I’m not going outside, I’m going topside. I need to get Myra out. I think she can help retrieve my sister.

Dialle sighed in my mind. He was silent for a long moment. Then,
All right, but be very careful. I believe the dungeon where she is being held is protected by Dis demons.

I did a mental shrug.
I can Dis with the best of ’em.

Go then, but you must return within the hour. From what I’ve managed to extract from Nerul already, our window for withdrawing your sister is quickly closing.

I thought a salute at him.
Aye, aye, cap’n!

At times you are so odd, Astra.

Chuckling, I grabbed up my weapons and marched from the room. I found Frick and Frack standing in front of the door as expected. “Come along boys, we have an angel to rescue.”

I grabbed each guard by his hard, muscular forearm and visualized the castle Dialle had extracted me from. Sight and sound stopped while we travelled.

I enjoyed staring at two surprised and horrified red faces for the entire trip, which only took seconds. When we landed, Frack gasped and jerked his arm from my grasp, looking around with trepidation.

I glared at him. “Man up, Frack, this is a simple angel extraction, you glugs should be able to do it in your sleep.”

Omnus frowned. “My name is not Frack.”

“It is now.”

Darielle, the larger of the two, cocked a craggy brow at me. “I suppose that makes me Frick?”

I turned away and headed quickly toward the wide, stone steps descending toward the dungeon. “Got it in one.” They hurried to catch up with me, pulling their swords from their sheaths as they ran. “Dialle said there are Dis demons here so look alive.”

“Frunkin’ wonderful,” one of them murmured.

As my adrenaline spiked in anticipation of the battle to come, I couldn’t help grinning. I’d missed kicking demon ass and found I was really looking forward to it. At that moment I realized something else. As battle lust slid through my blood, the effects of my Settling were muted.

Finally, something to mute the Settling.

All I had to do was give ass or kick it.

I liked having options.

~SC~

The stairwell down to the dungeons was wide at the top and grew progressively narrower as we descended more deeply into the putrid bowels of the castle. The smell, which had been an ugly promise at the top, became nearly insufferable by the time we reached the bottom.

I fought constantly with Frick and Frack to keep them from stepping in front of me, finally resorting to singeing Frick in his broad chest with a power arrow to get him to step back and let me have the lead.

Even so, I felt him tight at my elbow, breathing sulfurous breath down my neck, ready to leap between me and any trouble we encountered.

Damn stubborn devils.

We reached the lowest level and splashed into water. The stone and dirt floor was dotted with cold, oily puddles of water as well as piles of refuse. The place smelled like a backed up voiding receptacle.

I pulled my shirt up, covering my nose with it and groaned. “The stench alone could kill a person.”

I turned to find Frick glaring at me disapprovingly, his beady black eyes flicking to my exposed belly.

“You’re kidding me right? You’re a member of the dark world. You aren’t gonna go all judgmental and puritan on me are you?”

“A queen should carry herself at all times with decorum and passivity.”

I snorted. “You’d like that wouldn’t you? Where’d you get that drivel?”

Frick’s scowl deepened. “It is the way of our people. You are to be treasured and protected at all costs. It is a great honor to be your guard.”

Several snarky remarks flashed through my mind. To my credit, I didn’t spew any of them, I simply gave him a nod. “I think you might need to rewrite the queen of the devils rules just a tiny bit, Darielle. I’m not your average queen, and it’s unlikely I ever will be.”

His wide face split in a grin, making me frown with suspicion. “What?”

“You called me Darielle.”

I shrugged. “Frick suits you better.”

His stupid grin widened. I shook my head, turning away. “Let’s get my aunt out of here and get back to Dialle. We’re running out of time.”

Despite the seemingly endless hallways apportioned by hundreds of metal doors, it didn’t take us long to find her. I sent out my sensing power and located her aura within only a few minutes. The problem we had was that she was being guarded by not one, but two Dis demons. Dis demons were huge, usually close to nine feet tall, and they had black bodies with patches of snow white hair on their heads, arms and chests. A Dis demon’s wide, simian brow hung over a pair of small, red eyes to the point that you could barely see the eyes. Dis demons tended to place themselves in front of whatever they were protecting and not move, until you tried to move around them. They seemed to have the capacity to expand to fill whatever space they needed to fill.

I’d never fought one, but I knew Dialle had. He’d made a five hundred piece puzzle out of one a while back, at Demonica, the demon king, Alcott’s center of operations before it was destroyed. I figured, if Dialle could defeat one I certainly should be able to.

I glanced at Frick. “You guys take the one on the left, I’ll get the bigger one.”

Frick’s massive head was shaking before the last word came out of my mouth. “Nay. You wait here and we’ll kill them both.”

“Not happenin’ devil.” I started toward the demons. “Fine, I’ll kill them both.”

Frick reached out an enormous paw and wrapped it around my forearm. “Nay! You stay here, where you’ll be safe.”

I reached up and touched his ear with a power saturated finger. The finger sparked and he jerked under what I knew was unimaginable pain. A lower devil’s ears, like a demon’s, are excruciatingly sensitive. Smoke drifted upward from the ear and the smell of cooked meat wafted past my nose. Frick sighed, dropping my arm. “Fine, you may kill the smaller one.”

I grinned. The back and forth had been just for show. I knew where I wanted to be at the culmination of the negotiation, and that was where I ended up. The smaller demon was obviously the more intelligent of the two. I could tell by the way his small, red eyes followed my every move.

I felt smug. Although outsmarting a lower devil wasn’t exactly solar rocket science, it was personally satisfying anyway. I nodded my agreement and sighed, making Frick believe I’d given up more than I’d wanted to give, and started toward the smaller Dis demon, which was eight and a half feet tall if it was an inch.

I watched the demon carefully for signs of its weak points. Generally a demon will telegraph its weaknesses by protecting them somehow. Standing so that the weak area is away from you, or holding its arms over a certain body part.

The Dis demon’s body language didn’t change discernibly as I approached it. It stood in an open, defensive posture, hands that could pop a basketball spread at its sides.

Wide open and ready for me.

Not a good sign.

“Okay,” I murmured, “so you have no weaknesses, eh?” I stood a few feet away, aware that Frick and Frack had engaged the second demon and were having a jolly old time amidst the sound of grunting and the splashing of bodily fluids nearby.

I only hoped the blood came from the demon rather than my enthusiastic guards.

Somehow I doubted it.

I caught the demon’s red gaze and held it, my hands filled with knives and my power throbbing just under the surface of my skin, ready to be pulled out at the first sign of movement from the demon.

But it didn’t move. The thing’s red gaze locked onto mine and its massive body held firm.

I concentrated hard on the area behind it, realizing there wasn’t much room between its huge, rocklike body and the metal door, and pulled my power forward.

I saw the slight widening of the demon’s eyes as I started to disappear, and realized I’d lost the element of surprise.

Sure enough, when I reappeared just behind it, the demon was turned, waiting for me, and grabbed me by the shoulders before I could attack.

It threw me high and hard, toward the greasy wall on the other side of the passageway. I hit the metal grate in the door and barely avoided being grabbed by a filthy claw of a hand that snaked through the grate as I hit.

The impact knocked all the air from my lungs and nausea blossomed in my stomach from the pain. A filthy face replaced the clawed hand and sewer breath swept over me. “Better get up, missy.”

I blinked and saw the Dis demon standing over me, its face unreadable in the dim light. I rolled as it reached for me, using a preternatural speed that seemed impossible given its size and blocky build. I hadn’t been expecting that kind of speed and barely avoided its grasp.

A bloody sword lay on the ground beside where I landed. Grabbing it, I leapt to my feet and flipped, flying over the demon’s head and slashing downward with the sword as I skimmed passed.

I was pleased that I managed to open up a sizeable gash in the demon’s chest before landing behind it. Lunging forward, intending to embed the sword up to the hilt in the thing’s back, I suddenly found myself flying over its head again. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been my idea.

The demon had turned, grabbed my sword, and used it to launch me across the space. I hit the same door and slid downward again to the sound of rusty chuckling from the cell’s inhabitant.

I glared at him. “I’d like to see you do better.”

The damnable creature only laughed harder. I guessed I couldn’t blame him. Opportunities for entertainment were probably very scarce when you occupied a dungeon cell in one of the lower circles of Hell.

I was just glad I could lighten his day.

I climbed to my feet a bit more slowly and flicked a glance toward my guards, to see if they were faring any better than I was.

Negative.

They were both battered and blood covered, and their massive adversary looked fresh as the day he was formed from Brimstone and fire.

Frick slid a black, worried gaze toward me and shrugged.

“Time for Plan B,” I told him. He lifted his craggy brow and nodded. I knew he had no idea what Plan B was because I hadn’t had a Plan B up until about a second earlier. But he was willing to go along with whatever I came up with. Just like that, no questions asked.

I was starting to like the big, red guy.

I started to pull my power forward again, holding it just under the surface of my mind, and, just before I let it envelop me, I yelled at Frick. “Keep them busy!”

Then I started to shimmer away, my intention was to shimmer into the cell and grab Myra while the Dis demons were busy with my guards.

It seemed like a good idea. Until a massive hand clamped around my throat and squeezed, distracting me from my shimmer in my effort to breathe.

The laughter from the nearby cell became hysterical with glee. I longed to shut him up with a fist to the nose. Alas, I had to focus on not dying instead.

The demon lifted me until my feet were dangling a few inches from the ground. I grabbed its rocklike hand with both of my own and carefully plied them with power in an effort to pry them loose. Unfortunately, I couldn’t blast them because I’d shoot myself in the throat in the process. My powers of reasoning were quickly dimming due to lack of air and my hands had virtually no strength left in them.

Frick threw himself at the demon and bounced off, landing on his ass beside us looking dazed. As big as he was, he looked puny next to the monstrous demon trying to strangle me.

In desperation, I placed a hand on the demon’s broad chest and sent every ounce of my power toward its black heart, even tapping the extra power from my daemon hickey. Dialle’s power. It was enough to send the demon staggering a few steps, forcing it to release its hold on my throat.

I quickly popped away, praying I didn’t land inside a wall or something, since I had no visual cues to utilize in my travels. I reappeared just inside the cell door, relieved beyond words to have succeeded in my space shift.

It took me a moment to find Myra. She was huddled in a dark corner with several other chained angels. The only way to release them was to kill the owners of their chains. Fortunately for Myra, Slayer had already done that for her. Myra was holding her chain, staring blankly at the empty cuff.

I went to her, one ear strained toward the sounds outside the door, and knelt down, my heart plummeting as I noted her pitiful condition.

Aside from looking almost too weak to sit upright, she was pale, deathly so, and covered in bruises and contusions. Her formerly silky blond hair was tangled and knotted with blood and unmentionable things. Her wings were crushed beneath and behind her, looking as if they could never be returned to their former, magnificent state.

She held one arm against her body as if it were injured. When I pulled the sleeve of her robe back I gasped, the arm was horribly torn and something white and sharp stuck up from it.