The Spear of Light tumbled out of my fingers and hit the ground with a hollow clang, sending out a blaze of light before it went still and silent.
I held up my hands, letting out a breath.
This wasn’t my final defeat, but they didn’t know that. I let the knowledge comfort me despite my gritted teeth and the despair taking root in my heart.
The demon on Lucifer’s back pulled the dagger away, letting his face drop back into the ashes. I felt the spear point recede from my side, leaving behind a radiating pain and the wetness of my cooling blood.
Rough hands gripped my arms, pulling them behind me back. I refused to look away from Lucifer as they tied me with rough ropes, tying my wings down, binding my wrists and ankles together, even though I felt Satan watching me.
He didn’t deserve the attention he craved. I was here for Lucifer, and him only.
The other Irkallans were giving Lucifer the same treatment, moving his limp body around as they tied him. They all gave the Spear a wide berth, but marched me out to the edge of the precipice, forcing me away from Lucifer.
Satan gripped my chin, forcing my face upwards. “All that fight for nothing,” he said, using Nergal’s melodious voice. “I hope you hold onto it.”
I’d known that Satan was the one speaking through Lucifer. I was the one who’d caused him all this frustration, forcing him to run and hide… and he wanted me to fight so he could keep tormenting me.
As long as I was in his grasp, he’d make me his songbird. The screams of my torture would be his music.
I kept my expression dead. He wanted a fight? He wouldn’t get one from me. It went against everything I was, but I was determined to deprive him of the one thing he wanted the most.
Satan’s frown confirmed my suspicions. He gripped my chin hard, almost enough to make me cry out, then shook my head and released me. I would’ve stumbled off the edge of the cliff if the Irkallan demons didn’t have a tight grip on my ropes.
“Lead us home,” he ordered, turning his back on me. One of his dark wings slapped my face as he passed, leaving a stinging mark behind.
The Irkallan holding my ropes pushed me forward. I turned my head to find Lucifer, to make sure he was fine, but another stinging slap hit the other side of my face.
Blinking tears away, hellbent on not even giving them that, I started walking.
“Drink.”
The keeper I’d come to know as Damuzid shoved a glass bottle in my face, lifting it to my lips with a scowl.
The water was light brown and gritty, and tasted bitter, but it was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted after days of walking.
And I didn’t want it. I wanted nothing that they offered me. I turned my face away, and Damuzid gripped my jaw, forcing my mouth open and pouring the water in.
I coughed and spluttered. Damuzid slapped me. I felt the stinging red imprint of his hand on my face, but felt oddly numb to it at the same time.
By now, my cheeks and jaw had to be yellow and purple with bruises. Satan allowed them to slap me, but no more.
Bruises healed fast, he said. Slicing into my skin would take longer to heal, and he wanted me to last for a very, very long time.
It’d taken all my willpower not to spit in his face when he said that.
“Sit down and rest while you can. We have a way to go.” Damuzid pushed me to my knees.
I fell to them gratefully. My thighs ached from the exertion of not falling off the side of a mountain. With no hands or wings to keep my balance, descending from the Irkallan mountains had not been easy.
I’d fallen more times than I could count, scraping my knees bloody, twisting my ankles on treacherous rocks, and once smashing my face into a boulder when I slipped. The wound on my forehead felt clotted and dirty. None of them had offered to clean the grit out of the cut.
But Sarai was fine. I reserved all of my magic for her, keeping the shield around her intact even while I was given a brief hour or two to sleep every night.
I was so tired. Even my bones felt like they might crumble if I was pushed the wrong way.
The sand beneath me was soft and warm, luring me into its embrace. Swirls of white ash were mixed into the darkness of it, but before I could let my eyes drift shut, I tried to sit up a little more.
They always kept Lucifer out of my sight. I knew it was deliberate, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
Until we reached Kur, I knew I wouldn’t see him again.
I was too exhausted to search for long. I let myself slump down to the sand, my muscles worn thin, running on nothing but a bite of bread once a day and dirty water.
It felt like my eyes had barely shut when Damuzid jerked me upright by the ropes behind my back, sending sharp lances of pain through my shoulders. I stumbled to regain my footing, my eyelids feeling as heavy as bricks… my hope wearing thin.
It’d been three days.
Three days since I’d been spat out by the Between, right where I needed to be. Everyone should’ve been right behind me.
Three days without a single sign of them.
In the depths of my exhaustion, the fear clenching my chest was almost crippling. What if they’d gotten lost?
What if they’d taken the portals home, thinking we were already there?
I blinked, my eyelids feeling as gritty as the water as Damuzid pushed me into line. I followed Aya obediently, a demon I’d learned like to twist fingers backwards until they felt like they would snap. It’d taken talking back only once to learn that the hard way.
The Irkallan desert was as black as the Starsea, as blasted as the Dis wastelands, but it lacked warmth or beauty.
It was just… endless. The only break in the landscape was the paved road we followed, and enormous bones that jutted from the sand like skyscrapers. Most were in the distance, but one bone, curved like a rib, had been closer to the road.
It had been so large we’d walked in its shadow for nearly five minutes. I couldn’t fathom what had once lived and died out here, and I’d seen terrible monsters in the Between.
Hours passed. When I dropped, my strength gone, Damuzid dragged me over stones until I got back up and stumbled after him. Once or twice he forced me to drink again after he caught a black look from Satan.
“You’re not taking care of his songbird very well,” I rasped. My lips were chapped and dry, even after the water, and my brief laugh came out rusty.
Damuzid’s face darkened. My pants were shredded around my knees and thighs from being dragged on the stone road, and the visible skin was welted purple and etched with red scrapes.
“You’re not safe,” I told him. All I wanted to do was lie down and close my eyes. “No matter what you think. You’re more expendable to him than I am.”
I looked back, an automatic twitch, searching for Lucifer.
Damuzid snarled and dragged me forward, setting a harsh pace until I was too tired to speak again.
The first star appeared on the horizon when I saw something new in this hellscape.
A black statue, half-buried in the sand. I squinted at the woman’s face, surrounded by a lion’s mane. Clawed forearms gripped the edge of her pedestal as the rest of her was slowly swallowed by the sand. There was something about the darkness of the stone that disturbed me, how familiar it was, yet unlike the obsidian of my home.
An involuntary shiver ran down my aching spine. I’d seen her before, on a wall in the succubi temple.