standing stiff at their duty. Unsure of what lay beyond, but certain the fiends wouldn’t be set out to guard an empty hallway-as there hadn’t been any up to now-I decided it best to wait until Poe came out.
He took his damn time.
After about an hour, I was leaning against the wall yawning when I heard the hinges squeal. The fiends shuffled. I darted the opposite direction from the door and slipped down another of the intersecting corridors, all the while hoping Poe went out the same way he came in. Hidden in the shadows, I heard the measured slap of Poe’s footsteps as he strode past. I let out the breath I was holding and waited another few minutes to make sure he was gone. Once I felt confident he’d gone back through to the fiend room, I drifted out and went back to the guarded door.
I waved the fiends aside and they obeyed without resistance. A deep breath to steady my nerves, I opened the door and stepped inside.
Chapter Sixteen
The door swung open, and so did my eyes, as I went into the room. I knocked the door closed behind me as a sudden wave of mystical energy hit me like a bus. It took a second to clear the stars from my eyes in the wake of the magical energy. Once I could see again, I almost wished I couldn’t.
The room was monstrous in size and in intent. Embedded all along the walls, set six high as though they were stacked mausoleum crypts, were naked people, bodies melted into the stone behind them. Their skin was mottled and gray, their blackened eyes staring off at nothing. Slack-jawed, their skin sagged as though there was no muscle behind it; they were nothing but rotting skin and bones. I could smell the decay in the room, multiplied by the thousands of bodies that hung from the walls.
Clear tubes ran the gamut of the open floor, their ends driven into the chests and groins of the corpses. A thick, greenish-yellow liquid seeped inside the tubing, running down their lengths and traversing the floor until they ended at a contraption set near the center of the room. Shaped like a massive sarcophagus, the hoses were hooked to the sides. A pulse of energy emanated from the box. Its rhythm sounded a heartbeat.
Hanging from a mass of silvered chains above the box was a glowing green orb about the same size as a manhole cover. It hummed with power and I recognized it as the energy that had struck me when I entered the room. Almost liquid in its consistency, it brought to mind a dimensional portal. There was a strange feeling of otherworldly essence, which tingled at the edge of my senses.
I had no idea what the room was for, or what the hell Poe was doing here, but it didn’t take a genius to realize Baalth was involved. Poe wouldn’t bat an eyelid without the demon’s okay.
As I walked across the room, I caught sight of one of the bodies taking a breath. A chill settled over me. I looked up and watched as the man’s chest expanded, just barely, and then deflated. Examining the ones around him, they showed the slightest signs of motion; a tremble here, a breath there. They were still alive.
The part of me that was guided by my mother, her values, her beliefs, screamed at me to free the people, to tear them down and end their suffering. For the first time in my life, I ignored that piece of me. I’d always held my mother on a pedestal, and still did for that matter, but all the uncertainty of what I’d discovered made me question even that relationship and the instincts that came with it. How could she have been with Lucifer and never tell me? Though I wanted to push all that away and not think about it, the thoughts of what might have been kept storming back. What else had been kept from me? What else didn’t I know?
Sickened by my dilemma and all that I saw, I was reminded of Asmoday’s plan to draw power into Glorius. He’d used The Gray as a focus point, the wizard’s body drawing the energy into the God-proof room and directing it into Glorius. This looked very similar in nature and had me wondering what it was for. No one needed Baalth to accrue more power.
The thought brought back the sweats. Uncomfortable and warm, I continued down the line. The only solace I had was that the people didn’t seem to suffer despite the ruin of their bodies. None looked perplexed or in pain. They all had expressionless masks for faces and hung limp in the grip of the stone wall, silent. The flickers of life they showed seemed involuntary and not a conscious effort to be free of their entrapment.
That wasn’t much to cling to, but it was all I had.
As I reached the box at the center of the room, I realized there were stairs on one side of it, leading to the top. After all I’d seen around it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out what was inside. Curiosity won out. I resisted drawing a breath to settle my nerves, not wanting to inhale any more of the rotten flesh smell than I already had, and mounted the steps. I went slowly, not in any kind of a hurry, but the last step came fast. Tossing the last of my hesitance aside, I glanced over the edge.
Inside was Henry McConnell: The Gray.
I grabbed the edge of the box to stop from falling over. McConnell was dead. He’d been killed buying us time against the Nephilim and vampires that tried to invade Heaven. I’d seen his corpse carried down from on high by angels, but here he was.
Just like all the other people in the room, McConnell looked like a ragged zombie, but there was no loss of meat on him. His skin was a pale gray, matching his namesake. The flesh of his substantial frame split and peeled from the bone. Unlike the rest, The Gray was submerged inside the runoff of the greenish-yellow liquid, which ran from their bodies. His massive chest sat still. No motion disturbed the translucent fluid. His eyes were closed, but steady flutters of magical current wafted from him.
I wondered if Baalth was trying to bring him back to life. Without a necromancer on call, I could imagine the demon lieutenant doing whatever he could to keep the services of McConnell. Though only human, the wizard had stood against angels and demons alike and had conquered more times than not. He was a powerful force of magic with a less than moral bent, which was just perfect for the things Baalth needed of him.
It all started to make sense. It also explained why Baalth appeared to be under control of his power again. He’d given me a small taste of his magic in trade for dealing with Reven, Karra’s necromancer pet, but it hadn’t been nearly enough to take the edge off, so to speak. I glanced around the room, at all the bodies that had been through hell, and had a pretty good idea they were part of a filtering system that channeled the demon’s energy into the pool. Having realized his blood and energy could heal, somewhat like Lucifer’s could, it didn’t surprise me he might think he could resurrect the wizard. It was pure ego to attempt it, but I’ve learned to never put anything past Baalth. You didn’t become a lieutenant in Lucifer’s army without balls.
I glanced up at the orb above and watched its swirling energy for a moment. It was mesmerizing. The emerald energy danced and shimmered and cast its eerie glow across the room. Wondering what else was I might find, I tore my gaze from the orb.
I cast one last look at McConnell. He was staring back at me. My heart sputtered. His ice blue eyes were encircled in red, but they weren’t the black pits of the rest of the people in the room. He also didn’t seem immune to the torture being visited upon him, now that he was awake. His face was lined with deep creases, his lips curled into a pained sneer above his full white beard. He looked like Santa Claus in a bad bondage flick.
Bubbles roiled from his mouth as he tried to speak, the thick fluid preventing the words from forming. He thrashed about, his movement limited by the narrow confines of the case. Apparently too weak to break the surface of the liquid, he reached out with a hand that fought to get nowhere.
As much as I hated the bastard, I couldn’t handle seeing him stuffed inside the torture box. He’d gone out on his shield-whatever his reasons for doing so-and it didn’t feel right for him to wind up as Baalth’s science project.
Without any thought to what might happen, I braced myself against the edge and reached for him.
“I wouldn’t do that, Frank.” The quiet voice stopped me before I hit the surface of the tank. The calm words carried weight. I looked to see Baalth walking toward me. He looked haggard, not at all like the last time I’d seen him. “Step away from Henry, and whatever you do, don’t touch the liquid.”
I stood there defiant, my hands dangling over the edge.
“It’s for you own safety, Frank. If another living being were to come in contact with the solution, all of the power collected inside its atoms would be released into the unfortunate thing that touched it. It would be like having a thousand nuclear bombs going off inside your chest. Messy, and quite fatal. So, unless your last wish is for me to scoop up your remains and return them to Longinus’ daughter in a Ziploc, I suggest you take my
