Page 41 of Hellbound

Before Marian could think of a truthful reply that would preserve her promise to Mr. Vale, something lashed around her wrist. Blinding pain pierced her skull, pounding between the eyes. The mark in her other arm blazed as though she was carving it all over again.

Screams from numbers untold. Cries unceasing, pleas for mercy that will not come. The last light fades as bone and flesh are twisted—remade—in an image not of their kind. The price of betrayal is paid in eons of agony. A promise is broken, an oath is made—

Marian roared in pain. She tried to rip her arm free, but the darkness wouldn’t let go. Marian burned in invisible flame.

“Pull me out!” She screamed.

Tori rushed to Marian’s side, her hands raised in uncertainty. “But I can’t touch you!”

Just as the traveler’s gold light appeared in her periphery, the gate let her go. Marian stumbled backward. She raised her wristband to her lips and yanked the fabric down with her teeth, frantically searching her scar for light like she’d seen on her last dive. But there was no light; only ruined flesh. The pain vanished, her nerves resetting instantly. The agony transformed into a distant memory.

“Are you OK? What happened?”

Marian squinted through the receding pain to the object in her unmarred hand. She’d been released from the shadows, but it seemed that some darkness had come with her.

It was no key between her fingers, but a crooked shard of something caught between all states of matter. Solid to the touch, yet gaseous as its edges blurred and brushed across her knuckles like wisps of smoke. It maintained one distinct shape—a rippling sliver of the darkest night.

Before she could even attempt an explanation, or examine what she’d taken from the gate, a deafening sound rang out. Hundreds of feet of metal screeched as the gate groaned open, revealing an unobstructed path forward. Marian threw a furtive glance down the length of the tunnel.

“What is that?” Tori whispered.

She traced the edge of it with her thumb, hesitating at the prick of a finely honed edge against the pad of her finger. Fuck, it was sharp. Her hands stilled as a word leaped to mind.

“A knife.”

Yet it was unlike any knife Marian had ever seen. And not at all what the demon had sent her to find. But that strange instinct assured her it was what she’d come to Hell for. A key in its own right.

Tori hovered beside her and stared at it. “It looks like a shadowy banana to me. Is that normal?”

A damn good question. The shard of indeterminate metal in her hand felt nothing like the artifacts she usually sifted from the rubble. The knife in her hand hardly weighed more than a pound, but she couldn’t shake the fear that she’d just picked up a metric ton of “oh shit.”

Vale, she thought grimly. What the fuck are you up to?

“There is no normal here,” Marian replied as she clutched the knife to her side, fingers sliding into unseen grooves that fit her grip perfectly. She eyed the open gate and the unobstructed path that descended even deeper into the darkness. As much as she loathed leaving a new route uncharted, she’d made a deal.

“All right, Lite Brite,” Marian said as she forced herself to leave another mystery behind. “Your turn. Lead the way.”

“This is it,” the traveler announced.

They’d backtracked to the hall of doors, back to the foyer and into one of the many Tower halls that Marian had traversed before.

Now they stood where the path ceased and stared at a blank gray wall. The smell of sulfur was strong here, but they’d encountered no illusions. Just half a mile of corroded metal walls.

An anticlimactic arrival.

Marian dragged her eyes from the floor to the ceiling. “Let me guess. This is another lie?”

“Yep.”

Marian hummed low as she inspected the wall, not that there was much to see. So, she felt. Despite the disconcerting pressure in the air, Marian sensed nothing on the other side; too much nothing. A void.

“Point me toward the handle or knob or whatever,” Marian said.

“It doesn’t have one.”

Marian’s fingers tightened around the knife at her side. Most of what she took from Hell fit in a pocket, but this was an exception.

She shot Tori a derisive look. “Then it’s not really a door, is it?”