Turning toward the lingering aroma, he rushed toward it, eager for his mission to finally be over. After all this time, the pieces had at last fallen into place, and the beginning of the end was about to commence.
At the far end of the basement room the first of the Shaitan stopped before a closed door. He pulled it open to reveal what appeared to be a storage closet. Inside there was an old metal bucket and a mop, and some boxes stained and mildewed from water damage.
Gazing inside, Taranushi felt his smile grow wide with excitement, for he did not see an empty closet; he saw so much more.
He saw through the drifting malodor what had once been there not so very long ago.
Not a closet, but a passage to Hell.
A passage that would soon exist again.
Hell
The entire cave was shaking, the shrieks and moans of a Hell being gradually murdered echoing down the stone passage to where they were.
“It won’t be long now,” Malachi said wistfully, gazing off in that direction. “Changing . . .”
Francis dropped his bare feet down from the stone table to the floor, feeling the violent vibrations increasing in intensity. The entire place—the entire mountain—was just a few minutes away from being shaken to rubble.
The Hellion had risen from where it had patiently lain the entire time he was being tortured—the elder angel rummaging through his brain as if looking for a favorite winter hat. The foul beast paced nervously, glancing toward the sounds of its world being torn asunder.
Francis didn’t know what he was going to do. To say he was weak was an understatement. If asked, Francis would have had a difficult time admitting that he was even alive, but if he wasn’t going to attempt something, who was?
Malachi wasn’t right in the cabeza—a trait that he’d noticed seemed to be quite common in many of the Lord’s more powerful creations of late—and he certainly wasn’t up to anything good. Francis missed being able to pick up the Batphone to give Remy a call. Struggling to stand, he wondered whether Eliza had reached out to the angel, the memory that he had left her one of Remy’s cards, just in case, giving him a warm feeling in his tummy.
Or that just could have been his insides melting to slag.
Maybe Remy would be arriving any minute now, he thought, as the floor of the cave hummed beneath his feet. Flying down the cave corridor, guns blazing—no, Remy would most likely be carrying a sword—sword blazing, coming to save the day.
“You’re smiling,” Malachi said to him, raising his voice to be heard over the commotion outside.
Francis leaned back against the stone table, still too weak to stand on his own two feet.
“Was I?” he commented. “Must be a touch of gas.”
“I thought that perhaps you had resigned yourself to the approaching change . . . a moment of clarity before . . .”
Francis could sense it coming.
“Before what?” he asked, tensing to do something, but what, he did not know.
“Before your usefulness was brought to a close.”
Malachi struck with the speed of a cobra. That fucking scalpel was out again, and whenever that bad boy made an appearance, nothing good followed.
At first Francis thought that nothing had happened, that whatever Malachi was going to do was somehow avoided as the elder stepped back away from him.
But then he followed the elder’s eyes, and felt the growing tightness in the flesh of his stomach.
“You fucking didn’t,” Francis slurred, not wanting to look down at himself, but really having little choice. He leaned farther back against the table and slowly tilted his chin down to see the extent of the damage.
“You have always been a prominent fixture in the visions gifted to me by the fruit of the Tree,” Malachi said.
Francis looked down at his chest, seeing the fine line that started just below his sternum and went down to his groin. Blood had started to seep from the edges, making the line—the cut—that much more noticeable.
“And little by little I figured out why.”
His legs began to give out, and he caught himself on the stone table’s edge, the sudden movement causing the incision in his belly to tear apart, exposing his inner workings to the outside world.
“In using you as their agent, the Thrones provided me with the perfect all-purpose tool for my needs: strong, cunning, ruthless, penitent, and quite resourceful.”
Francis’s hands went to his belly, and he pressed them against the diagonal cut, desperate to keep his insides from sliding out onto the floor.
“And they gave you certain gifts . . . certain useful gifts to make you a better executor of God’s will.”
Malachi retrieved what looked to be a bowl from a collection of crap cluttering a formation of rock jutting from the cave wall used as a shelf.
“One of those gifts is in your blood.”
Someone had pulled the cave floor out from beneath him, and Francis found himself dropping down to his knees. The impact was jarring and he felt what was inside him—what he wanted to keep inside him—press against his hands. He was successful in preventing his inner workings from leaving his body.
But there was nothing he could do about the blood.
Malachi placed the bowl beneath him, capturing the scarlet spill as it rained down from his belly.
“The Thrones gave you the gift of passage . . . the ability to open doorways from here to there.”
Malachi’s eyes looked around the cave, dust and bits of rocky debris raining down as the Morningstar continued his renovation project outside.
“From here . . . to there.”
The elder bent down to Francis’s level, looking at him eye-to-eye.
“The gift is in your blood,” Malachi said as he retrieved the bowl, its contents splashing out over the rim.
The cave shook as if having a fit, huge cracks suddenly appearing in the floor as well as the wall. Unable to stay upright, Francis fell onto his side, his hand momentarily leaving his stomach—the results unpleasant. Despite its anxiety, the Hellion was there to sniff at the bloody innards that had temporarily spilled. The beast growled at him, snapping at his fingers as he attempted to retrieve them and shove them back where they belonged.
Malachi stood there, silently watching as Francis struggled with the beast over a section of his intestine.
“I’m done with you, Fraciel,” the elder announced. “My visions of you end with the collection of your blood, and my escape from . . .”
He looked around the cave again, larger pieces of rock and dust raining down from the ceiling.
“. . . this place. Strangely enough, I’ve grown rather fond of it during the time I’ve waited for your arrival.”
Francis had managed to take back the rubbery piece of his guts, shoving it deep inside his abdominal cavity, while giving everything that he had to remaining conscious.
A large section of rock dropped from the ceiling to land atop the Hellion’s skull-like head. The beast yelped, retreating back toward a patch of shadows along the wall.
The place was coming apart at the seams; it wouldn’t be long now.
Malachi turned his back to him, approaching an area of wall with the bowl of his blood.
Francis willed himself to get up; despite all the pain, and his current opened condition, he forced himself up onto his knees.
Standing at the wall, Malachi casually glanced over his shoulder, smiling as he dipped his fingers in the bowl of fresh blood and began to paint upon the wall.
“I’d like to reiterate how important you’ve been to this entire process,” he said, painting the angelic sigils—the beginnings of a spell—upon the cave wall. “It could not have been done without you.”
The sounds coming from outside were pretty scary, and Francis could only imagine what was happening.
Exactly what’s going to be happening inside not too long from now, he thought, swaying as the cave shook, and the large cracks branched off to smaller cracks that begat even more cracks than that.