Page 3 of The River of Fire
On the brick walls on each side of us, red flickers of light are reflected from something behind the brute still dragging my struggling body. It’s the same flickers that captured my attention in the first place. I now wish I was colorblind and just kept my nose pointing forward. Maybe then I’d be just a minute away from the dubious safety of my too-thin apartment door.
The red light gets brighter but at the same time the world around me darkens. What in the unholy fuck is going on right now? I’m still screaming into the masked stranger’s hand, trying to bite through the leather glove and hurt him enough to let my mouth go. Only muffled sounds come through and my teeth are ineffective. There’s pressure in my head and my ears feel like I’m on a rapidly descending plane, as if I need to yawn and let my ears pop. Fear twists a knife in my belly and tears leak out of my eyes.
A moment later the pressure disappears, but my head still feels like he reached in and stuffed cotton swabs where my brain once was.
The blackness dissipates and I see stone walls. Not brick, but giant blocks of dusty stone, the kind Mike and I saw in that abandoned medieval village we visited last summer. It’s dark,lit up only by the torch that is now somehow in my abductor’s hand. He pushes me forward and in my shock, I take two steps down the hallway.
“Welcome to Purgatory, half-blood,” the giant says, his voice so deep it’s made for Barry White songs.
Half what, though? And where?
“Purgatory?” I ask, still stunned, snippets from the theology-centered parts of my history studies coming back to me. He has to be kidding. This is probably some underground goth nightclub hidden in the alleyway near my home, and my attention made him think I was interested in a night with women in corsets and men with black nail polish. Oh, and can’t forget the guyliner.
“Think of it as the anteroom to Hell,” he says, pushing the cloak back and revealing his head. I know he’s grinning because I can hear it in his deep raspy voice, and the next moment he takes his mask off, revealing a handsome dark-skinned face. A face with glowing eyes of a golden yellow. Eyes with slit pupils. “Or you can think of it as home,” my abductor adds.
No. I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore.
Chapter 2 – Lana
Iwalk in front of the stranger who cheerfully introduced himself as Maalik, like he didn’t just kidnap me, feeling numb and spacey. Am I having a psychotic break? Was there a gas leak? Is this a bad trip?
We walk past heavy wooden doors, but he keeps herding me forward. I can hear voices, scared and confused. The hallway finally opens into a large atrium. The area is full of frightened people, their arms wrapped around themselves in comfort and their eyes wide, their ages ranging from late teens to mid-forties. Next, I notice the sky. Its strangeness does a better job of convincing me I’m not exactly somewhere… normal. Its color is a deep indigo and there are swirls of red coiling slowly, like a fucked up evil Aurora.
“I want to go home,” I say numbly, the embodiment of every horror movie cliché. I know my demand will be ignored evenbefore Maalik walks ahead of me to the group of people staring at him.
There are dozens of confused individuals giving him a doe-in-headlights look. A girl is puking her guts out, the people nearby giving her a wide berth. The sour smell of bile reaches me and my stomach protests. An older man on the other side is practically incoherent with panic and a woman with similar features tries desperately to calm him down so he stops attracting attention. Despite feeling like I may start bawling or throwing up at any moment as well, I feel an urge to comfort him myself.
“Let me repeat what you’ve been told as you were brought here today,” Maalik speaks in a voice that easily carries in the wide space. “You’re in the fortress of Abaddon,” he begins, leisurely walking among the gathered. “This realm is also known as Purgatory.” An Asian boy with pink streaks in his white hair tries to dart toward one of the archways and Maalik easily grabs him by the neck of his hoodie. “No, I am not human,” he continues, with a shit-eating grin on his face, clearly enjoying the gasps his statement evoked. He releases the boy, who is now frozen with fear. “No, I won’t kill you, though I cannot say the same for most of the occupants of this realm.” This elicits whimpers from the crowd he’s now meandering among like a lazy lion. “And my name is Maalik.” He stops in the middle and raises his hands like a benevolent saint. “But you can call me ‘yes, sir’,” he finishes and looks around with malice in those snake-like eyes and a predatory grin still plastered in its place.
I notice then that more men in cloaks and armor are standing by the arches around the atrium. I have a feeling they’ve been there the entire time and I just haven’t registered them until now. Some look bored, some look curious, and some look like we’re the dog shit they stepped in with their new Ferragamo shoes.
“You are here,” Maalik continues, “as a last attempt to save your pathetic, sin-riddled world from,” he shrugs, “well, yourselves. You see, with how humans are multiplying likerabbits in your mortal realm, so does sin. And where do sinners go?” he asks, looking around as if in search of an answer to his rhetorical question.
“To Hell?” a serious young man who can’t be much over twenty asks.
“To Hell,” Maalik confirms. “Which is now bursting at the seams like your Thanksgiving turkeys.”
I guess they must have cable TV here. His speech is an odd mix of modern phrases with the stuffy vocabulary of old lords. Or priests, ironically enough.
“Why are we here?” a hard looking, red-haired woman asks.
“Why, to cull the ranks, of course.” He once again grins as if delighted.
“How are we meant to do something you can’t?” I ask, surprising myself with my bravery.
“Excellent question. While you would not have noticed in the mortal realm, you have Celestial blood in your veins. Meaning you can, when properly trained, take on these manifestations of the sin your kind begot.”
Celestial blood? What does that even mean? Is that why he called me a half-blood?
I don’t have to inquire further because Maalik continues with his evil villain speech. “Your mommies or daddies or more likely great-grandparents had demonic or angelic blood.”
“What?” I ask numbly.
He looks at me with a suddenly serious expression. “You, specifically, had an angelic grandmother and demonic grandfather on your mother’s side. A highly unlikely combination you are, offspring of Nephalem.”
“Nephilim?” I ask, confused. Isn’t that the offspring of angels and humans? How surreal is it that I’m even thinking about these terms as an actual possibility?
“No, not a Nephilim or Cambion. The word for your particular combination is Nephalem. The common word is Elioud.”
