None of the mirrors we passed reflected us or the corridor. After looking into several of them, I quickly learned to keep my eyes straight ahead.
Until one of them, so familiar, caught my eye.
I knew his silver hair and blue eyes by heart, because they were etched there with hatred. Gabriel stepped through a smoking battlefield, the fighting over, and loomed over a beautiful Nephilim woman.
She had horns and dark hair, with blood spattered across her dress. She looked back up at him hopefully.
I gritted my teeth, wanting to kill Gabriel all over again. She’d looked at him like he was her savior, and he’d abandoned her to a terrible life.
I quickly stepped away, tearing my gaze away from the mirror.
“Not over there,” Belial said. Panic crushed my chest as I realized I’d almost left the group behind. I ducked into a side hall, following his dark mane of hair.
“Over here, you silly bitch.”
My panic turned to ice, freezing through my veins and stopping me dead in my tracks as I took in the difference.
Belial was wearing armor I’d never seen before, and we were standing in sand again, under a blazing hot sun.
A thirty-foot tall golden sphinx towered over us, looking down at him with a heart-stopping but impassive female face. Her tail switched, the tip bursting into white-hot flame.
“Sorry to do this, Mother.” He grinned up at the sphinx, twirling a sword in one hand. “But I am what you made me, after all.”
I’d followed a memory. And there was nothing behind me but empty air.
25
Melisande
“Fuck,” I croaked. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
The memory of Belial shifted forms, becoming a lion as the mountainous sphinx plunged forward through the sand, charging towards him.
I closed my eyes against a spray of sand, but nothing hit my face. When I opened them, both Belial and the sphinx were gone. I was alone in an empty desert.
My breath stuttered, my chest tightening like it was caught in a vise. I whirled around, but there was nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.
Except for a faint glimmer in the sand where Belial and the sphinx had been. I edged forward, finding a single clear puddle of water at complete odds with the desert around it.
If there was no way but forward in the Between, then I had no choice but to continue on. The others wouldn’t be able to circle back and find me.
It was hard to keep my breathing even, but I managed that. What I couldn’t manage was the painful gallop of my heart in my throat as I reached for them through our mate marks.
I felt them, but they felt distant… like they were a thousand miles away from me.
“Fuck.” I repeated the word a few more times for good measure.
The only way through was forward, even if I was alone. If I sat here and waited, I’d eventually become one of those crumbling skeletons, a sacrifice to gods who were no longer around.
I clenched my fists and stepped into the puddle, falling straight down into darkness.
And hit a solid floor, the water gone and the air cool around me.
It was another hallway. This one was empty, both to my relief and chagrin. It’d been too much to hope that the Between would just deposit me right back in my men’s laps.
All I could do was keep walking and think of Irkalla.
One end of the hall ended in a blank wall, and the other opened on darkness. I chose darkness, my ears pricked up for the sounds of my men.
The darkness became a white rotunda. I ducked around an orgy being held on the body of a lightning-wreathed god, who laughed as he watched people fuck on his chest, and through another door.
There was a Sin Eater at the end of the next hall, charging directly towards me with a guttural roar.
His fist connected with my jaw with a crack like thunder. I went flying backwards, throwing up my magic shields a second too late.
The doors to the Between had remained open, and the itch between my shoulder blades hadn’t been an anxious hunch at all. One of them had actually been insane enough to follow us in.
The Sin Eater gripped my hair and slammed me into a stone wall. Agony ripped through my shoulder, followed by the horrible sensation of his hot breath in my ear.
“Did you have to make it so hard to find you, fucking cunt?”
My mouth was full of blood, hot and sickening. I spat it in his face, shoving him away from me and buying a few seconds of time.
It was impossible to get the Spear unwrapped, but I ripped it from the holster on my back, aiming the bagged head of it at him. “How did you find me in here?” My voice came out harsh and raspy, and my tongue was still bleeding from the force of hitting the wall.
The Sin Eater unsheathed a cruel-looking sword. “Followed your smell.”
I shivered despite myself. The Sin Eaters disgusted me on a visceral level. I could just imagine one following my scent through the Between like an animal, tracking every step I’d taken.
He charged at me again, and I ducked aside, unable to make a clean stab through his armor.
“You killed us all,” he growled, rounding on me again. I backed through the nearest doorway, praying that something horrendous enough to stall him was on the other side. “I might be the last one, but I will fucking gut you before I die, woman. I swear it.”
Pure light washed over us as the Sin Eater charged again, sweeping out with his sword. The edge skated off my gilded armor, opened a thin line on my arm, and I whipped the Spear around.
The angle was wrong, and the blades just bounced off his side. The Sin Eater laughed as he circled me.
All I needed was one good opening, and he’d be cinders before he knew what hit him.
The Between finally did me a favor.
He flinched as a god with a wide rack of antlers and cloven feet passed between us. We barely reached the god’s ankles. The scent of pine trees and cold, wintry air followed in the memory’s wake, but I’d been prepared for a memory to disrupt us.
The Sin Eater was unprepared when I dove right through the god’s intangible hooves and drove the Spear into his chest, right through the leather bag and his armor.
Only the bare tips of the pronged spear points plunged into his skin, but it was enough. Even the tiniest contact with the Spear’s essence was catastrophic for anyone besides me.
White fire gushed out from under the Sin Eater’s helmet. He screamed and ripped it off his head, but there was no way out for him now. The fire tore from his eyes, nose, and mouth, burning him alive from the inside.
Within seconds, his empty armor dropped to the floor. Only a charred pile of demon remained inside.
I braced my foot on the chest plate and ripped the Spear free, crouching down as I carefully untied the bag and revealed the golden points. I’d been so panicked and terrified over losing everyone that I hadn’t even felt the pain when I’d gripped the Spear, although my palms were dark red with fresh burns.
I exhaled a deep breath. He’d said he was the last of them. The remaining Sin Eaters had all died trying, and failing, to kill me.
Now, at the very least, I knew I’d no longer be tailed by assassins. It was a cold comfort next to the thought that I was completely alone in the Between, and in my hurry to get away from the Sin Eater, I had no idea which direction I’d gone.
Not that it mattered much in this place.