Page 48 of Where Light Cannot Follow

He clears his throat but keeps his voice low. The lyrical, musical quality of it sends a current through my spine. It surprises me how I react. Perhaps it's just the thought of nearly losing that voice that has me so attached to it.

"Demons can... we can... feed on souls' pain to regain sensory pleasure." He frowns at this but continues. "It's done by exploiting the deepest wounds of a soul, then fracturing them. Deepening them. It's not like a loop, which is painful but often cleansing. This compounds the pain, splinters it, and with nothing to set it back in place—like a bone that heals crooked—the soul often sets incorrectly. Damning them. Trapping them here forever if they are damaged enough. Or worse for others.”

The shadows are lifting slowly, giving way to ebony, then a midnight purple. "Is that what happened to Constance?"

Virgil shudders. "Yes. I... perhaps I shouldn't have left her. I thought she was stuck in her loop, unreachable." He swallows audibly in the eerie stillness. "She escaped at some point and was discovered by a group of demons. They fed on her. I heard her screams. I ran to her. I did, but I was... too late."

"God," I breathe, unable to form other words. Here I'd judged this woman as manipulative, weak, sinful—deserving of hell, if I'm honest with myself. Most of my contempt came from defensiveness on Virgil's behalf. But now I see her differently. As a victim. A survivor who became something else because of what was done to her.

I'm not sure what to do with that yet. It sits there, heavy and undigested.

"I fed, too." Virgil says this with his eyes unblinking, staring straight ahead. It's lightened enough that I can make out the haunted expression in his gaze. "When I first arrived here."

Shame is a shackle on him, a coat buckled with iron chains. I don't need to address it directly. "So when a demon feeds, they can touch again?"

"Yes. And taste. And smell. And... other things. Things they grow very hungry for. Things they will exploit others to obtain. Without feeding on others’ experiences, they lose those senses entirely." He stops walking. "You should go, Dante. This path is dangerous. If you remain beside me, you face this exploitation. I need to disappear for a few decades, until I'm forgotten again. Then I can resume guiding."

"You don't think you're worth saving, do you?"

Virgil's face lifts at this, and all the heaviness of his expression washes away. Instead, he looks as bright and startled as a child.

"I am beyond saving."

"I don't believe that," I say.

"You continue on this path, you will pay for that belief with your own pain." There is no emotion in his voice. Just certainty.

I match his tone. "I've made up my mind. Sometimes you face volatile markets, declining sectors, and hostile conditions. But you identify a position worth taking, and you commit, for good or ill. I've found my position, Virgil." I raise my hand, palm up, offering. "I'm willing to hold it."

He stares at my palm like I'm offering a golden apple rather than an empty hand. He leans forward. I hold my breath. Waiting for his hand to hover above mine, untouching but felt regardless.

A scream tears my attention away.

Of course, I think. Of course, something interrupts.

The sound is so wretched and guttural that it makes the drowning souls in the swamps sound like a choir practice.

"Please," the woman begs, the word wet with desperation. "Please, please, don't."

Virgil steps alongside me and looks down the path ahead. "We should go a different direction."

But I can't tear myself away from the sobs. It's an adult making the sound, judging by the tenor of her voice, but she cries like someone being unmade piece by piece.

"Dante." Virgil's voice is firm. A command. "A demon is feeding. We must go."

The woman cries out again—a shriek of absolute helplessness, the terror of watching something precious destroyed while paralyzed, the pain of a hundred lifetimes ripped open and waded through.

"No," I say. "We can't walk away. That’s what I spent my entire life doing.”

"Dante." Virgil's whisper is urgent now. "You are still... you radiate with your own pain." He says this carefully, as though he doesn't want to wound me further. But I'm somehow beyond that consideration. "If you go down there, the demon will choose you next."

The woman wails again—the kind of sound that starts in the stomach, in the soul, and tears its way out.

I hesitate for only a moment before I run down the path.

Two figures stand in the crook of a corner, tucked against an ancient tree, further in the shadows. One—the screaming one—has pressed her hands over her ears. Tears glisten on her face and shimmer across her broad features. Her teeth are white, the only brightness in the scene. And she wails and weeps and begs like a woman watching her own execution in slow motion.

The other figure looms over her. His muscular arm flexes as he draws a single finger up the woman’s neck.