“I cast you out.”
“No,” I whispered, my stomach dropping. “Please. Mother.”
The booming of her voice rumbled about the receiving room.
“You are no son of mine.”
I fell to my knees, my legs buckling, my mouth open in disbelief. Surely, this was just another one of her tests, another way for me to prove that I loved her, that I would die for her cause.
The apparition on the mirrored wall stretched its arms out, gesturing at the pentacle I knelt in. The ground shattered, my chest pounding as I slipped into a sinkhole. I groped uselessly for thin air as I dropped into the vast pit of nothing beneath me.
I thought I would be sadder, more devastated. But the inside of my chest, like the void I spiraled into, only felt empty.
13
When the world stopped spinning, I sprang to my feet. Rather, I tried to. I was sprawled on the ground – in grass, it seemed. Warm, outdoors. The moment I even tried to push myself up, my head started whirling again. I coughed into the earth, spitting out bits of grass that left my tongue feeling tinged with acrid green. A sour taste in my mouth.
“Fuck me,” I groaned, already knowing that my hair was studded with bits of twig, little clumps of earth. “Fuck me sideways. It’s over.”
Mother Nature didn’t answer.
Summoning my strength and my withering sense of balance, I pressed my palms into the ground and struggled again, a tentative pushup to at least get me sitting upright. My head spun again. Still dizzy. I fell backwards, my ass landing painfully on what felt like a bunch of rocks.
I blinked blearily, squinting at the sun-filled world around me, wondering if Asmodeus had sent me to some specially designed torture chamber, a realistic simulation meant to lower my guard and torment me when I was at my most vulnerable. I looked around at grass, and more grass, a field dotted with vegetation and dying trees.
“The middle of nowhere,” I grumbled. “Better than a torture chamber, I guess.”
I clambered heavily to my feet, swaying uncertainly as my body slowly recalled what it meant to stand on two legs. There was nothing for miles around, far as I could tell, except for what looked like a rundown building, the shattered remains of what might once have been a house. The elements had stripped it of paint and personality, now just a ramshackle stack of dead wood and exposed cement.
She didn’t actually speak, but I swore I could hear Mother’s voice in my head. “Welcome to your new home.”
“A certified shithole,” I said out loud.
That was the thing with Asmodeus. The Prince of Lust knew her way around the pleasures of the flesh, but was even more talented in lessons of pain. Her punishments had always been very inventive. In most cases, agonizingly so. Abuse, you say? What makes you think of that?
I dragged my feet towards the ruined building, smacking my lips as I thought longingly about a drink of water. Mother was the kind of demon who knew her way around teleportation magic, sure enough, but she was also the kind of demon skilled enough to modify it to have some truly nasty aftereffects. This dizziness, the soreness all over my body, this sudden thirst? All her doing.
“Great parenting, overall,” I muttered, part of me perfectly aware that she could be anywhere out there, listening. “Just top notch.”
The babbling of water drew my attention to a stream that ran just a dozen or so feet away from the building. I shuffled faster, seduced by the promise of fresh water. I’d heard about amoebiasis and all sorts of other diseases humans could contract from drinking water that wasn’t poured by a servant from a crystal decanter. I had to hope that the demon half of me would kill any and all parasites that would try to ravage my insides. It’d be one good thing I got from my mother.
I stumbled across a rock hidden in the dry grass, falling flat on my face as I approached, one hand trying to break my fall, the other splashing as it reached the water. Cool and crisp, or so I presumed. I dragged myself the last few inches or so by my fingernails, plunging my head into the stream, gasping and gaping for water, then air as I drank too much and too quickly in one go, my face and my hair soaked to the skin and scalp.
Maybe I blubbered or sobbed into the water a little. I must have looked pathetic. If only Pierce could see me.
“Um. Quill?”
Great. Just great.
I turned my head, my cheek pressed against the earth, the sunlight warming half of my face as I slowly opened one eye. Of course. There was Pierce, standing over me, though the expression on his face was not one of mockery, but of concern.
“Um. Are you okay, Quill?”
I pushed myself off the ground, my head spinning when I realized I’d gotten up too fast. “Of course I’m not ‘okay,’ Pierce. How could you possibly think that?”
He backed away, raising his hands. “Okay. Geez. It was just a question.” I noticed that his arms were covered in scratches. Then that meant only one thing.
“You’re joking,” I groaned, rubbing my face. “Mother kicked you out? And Mr. Wrinkles, too?”
The Sphynx cat “mrrowed” miserably at the sound of his name, padding up to me, but not quite close enough to greet me with a head bump or by rubbing himself up against my leg. Instead he started mewling in my face, as if complaining about our shared predicament in his cat language.
“Not just us, actually,” Pierce said. “And you’d think I’d get at least a ‘Thank you’ for personally carrying that devil cat of yours in my bare arms, but – ”
The end of his sentence
