Raffe is the only one of them who is whole, uninjured, and fully winged with healthy feathers. He stands tall and muscular, with no scars or scabs on his powerful body.
The only thing marring his appearance is the dried-fruit necklace that the Pit lord gave him. One of the Watchers had picked it up off the ground, telling Raffe that it could be used to show that a Pit lord favored him. I think it looks like a dead mouse dangling off his neck.
‘We thought we’d never see you again, Commander,’ says Thermo. ‘We thought we were forsaken.’
‘We always knew we were meant to be forsaken,’ says Howler, ‘but it’s a different thing when it actually happens.’
‘What’s happening topside?’ asks Thermo.
Raffe tells them about Messenger Gabriel dying, Uriel expediting an election by creating a false apocalypse, the invasion on our world, and what happened with his wings.
While he’s talking to them, I watch Beliel. Like the others, he’s handsome, masculine, and torn up. But unlike the others, he looks toward Raffe with a conflicting mix of hope and anger.
‘You’re here to take us back with you, right?’ asks Beliel. ‘We’re not fully Fallen yet. We still have some of our feathers even.’ Some of the others chuckle like that’s a joke.
Beliel strokes the remaining patches of sunset feathers on his wing. ‘They’ll grow back once they can see real sunlight again. Won’t they?’
‘Let us help,’ says Hawk. ‘Give us a mission.’
‘Let us earn our way back, Commander,’ says Cyclone. ‘We’re wasted down here.’
Raffe takes a good look at them. He looks at their tufts of feathers and splintered wing bones sticking out at odd angles. He looks at their skinned limbs and gnarled wounds. I can see in his eyes that it hurts to see his loyal soldiers like this.
‘What happened to the others?’ asks Raffe. He looks at the dozen or so Watchers around us.
‘They have their own journeys to travel now.’ Thermo’s voice holds a world of sadness.
So if we brought them back, it’d be a dozen Watchers against a hundred of Uriel’s angels.
‘Where are the hellions?’ I ask.
‘They’re the least of our worries,’ says Beliel.
I look around at the barren landscape. No hellions in sight. ‘I need them. I might be able to use them to get out of here.’
They all stare at me.
‘Have you even been here long enough to be this crazy?’ asks Little B.
‘That’s how we got here,’ I say. ‘The hellions can jump in and out through my sword, and I grabbed one to hitch a ride.’ I shrug. ‘I guess you guys never held a sword on a demon long enough to do this before.’
‘It only takes a second to kill one,’ says Raffe. ‘No reason to pause before skewering him.’
There’s a moment of silence as they stare at me, then they look at each other.
I brace for the barrage of questions, but all they ask is, ‘Can we catch a ride too?’
I glance at Raffe. He nods. It wouldn’t surprise me if this has now turned into a rescue mission for Raffe as much as a mission to save the angel host back in our world.
‘You don’t really believe her, do you?’ asks Little B.
‘You got something better to do than listen to her?’ asks Howler.
‘I don’t know if it’ll work,’ I say. ‘But if you could help me find hellions and convince them to jump back into my world, then we can all try to leave here together.’
‘She’s as crazy as the rest of them,’ says Little B. ‘No one has ever escaped the Pit without permission from the higher-ups. Ever.’
‘She’s telling the truth,’ says Raffe. ‘We come from a different time, and we came through . . . one of you.’
They all look at each other.
Raffe nods at me, and I tell them my story. I tell them a version of it that I hope is a diplomatic one – one where I don’t mention which of them was the gateway and what condition he was in when we came through. When I’m done telling them about how we got here, everyone is silent.
‘If one of us is the gateway,’ says Beliel. ‘Then that must mean that the gateway Watcher can’t leave, right?’
I drop my gaze. If we manage to get out of here, he’ll be left behind for however long it takes him to claw and connive his way out of the Pit and onto earth. I have no idea how long that will be. But it’ll obviously be long enough to kill off all decency in him.
41
You’d think since we’re in the natural habitat of hellions, the place would be crawling with them. But most of them must be hiding, because we can’t find any. I’ve seen more hellions in Palo Alto than here.
Black smoke rises on hell’s horizon above one of the city ruins. I take a step onto the desert rocks near the sand, wondering how far it is to the nearest city. I have a strange urge to see the ruins. It might be an indication of what my world could be like one day.
‘Stop!’ one of the Watchers calls out just as I’m about to step onto the sand.
A hand whips out of the sand and grabs my ankle.
I scream, trying to yank my foot back. I kick the hand, but it pulls me off balance.
More hands burst out of the sand, reaching for me.
I try to scramble back, but the hand pulls me down.
I get my sword out and frantically slice.
Strong arms wrap around my waist, and a boot kicks the severed hand off my ankle, leaving maggots on my leg.
I shut my eyes and try not to squeal. ‘Get the maggots off me!’
Raffe brushes them off, but it feels like they’re still crawling on my skin.
‘So you do scream like a little girl,’ says Raffe with some satisfaction in his voice. I open my eyes a second too soon, because I catch him tossing the severed hand into the sand.
A forest of hands sprout up from the sand to grab it and tear it to pieces, fighting for the scraps.
I scoot away from squirming maggots. Raffe sees my distress and flicks them off the rock.
‘Maggots are freaky hideous,’ I say, getting up. I try to salvage some dignity, but I can’t help but shiver and shake my hands in the air. It’s an instinctive impulse, one I’m not up for resisting right now.
‘You’ve fought off a gang of men twice your size, killed an angel warrior, stood up to an archangel, and wielded an angel sword.’ Raffe cocks his head. ‘But you scream like a little girl when you see a maggot?’
‘It’s not just a maggot,’ I say. ‘A hand burst out of the ground and grabbed my ankle. And maggots crawled out of it and tried to burrow into me. You would scream like a little girl too if that happened to you.’
/>
‘They didn’t try to burrow into you. They were just crawling. It’s what maggots do. They crawl.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘Hard to argue with that, Commander,’ says Howler with a laugh in his voice.
‘That’s the Sea of Killing Hands,’ says Thermo. ‘You don’t want to get near it.’
I can see why they call it a sea. The sand shifts like waves. I’m assuming it’s because of the hands or whatever moving beneath it. I can’t help but see the similarities between the Pit and my world now that Uriel and his false apocalypse are creating things like the resurrected crawling out of the ground.
‘Oh, she could have handled the killing hands like the truest warrior,’ says Raffe proudly. ‘It’s the little naked worms that make her tremble.’
‘Maybe we should call her maggot slayer,’ says Howler.
The others chuckle.
I sigh. I probably deserve this, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Now I know how Pooky Bear feels.
I see a small hellion over the desert, and I point to it, excited. But it flies too close to the sand, and three hands shoot out and grab it. The arms are not the length of a regular arm. They reach up at least six feet to grab the hellion. It screeches all the way down until it gets dragged beneath the sand.
One of the guys points to an outcropping of rocks.
The small hellion that was caught by the hands must have been a scout, because a group of hellions flies toward us.
My sword is up, ready for a fight. ‘Don’t kill them. We need them alive.’
The flying creepies come at us all teeth and claws. They’re as big or bigger than the ones that came after me out of the Pit. There are four of them.
Beside me, Raffe opens his wings and takes to the air over the Sea of Killing Hands. The others do the same. Beliel and I are the only ones left on the ground.
They corral the hellions toward Hawk and Cyclone who catch them.
When they come down, they’ve caught all four. They tie the hellions down with leather thongs that some of them had wrapped around their wrists. Apparently, Raffe had trained them to collect bits of useful items from the local environment whenever they were on a mission.