“What… is that?” She did her best to not look at the creature’s face, and how Vinicius had done more than crack open its jaw. Blood poured from its shredded mouth and neck, and soaked the thirsty stones.
“A wurm,” he said.
“A hellbeast?”
“Yes.”
“But, it’s not twilight anymore. It’s day!”
“The quakes and damage likely stirred it to action.”
She threw up her hands. “So we have to worry about giant things like this!?”
Sighing, Vinicius pushed against the thick side of the creature. Fat and massive as the snake-like thing was, Vinicius half slid it, half rolled it across the stones enough to create room alongside its body.
“Can you–no, you can’t,” she said. “It doesn’t have any resonance to eat, does it?”
“No. It has some essence.”
“I’m not hungry.” Gulping, she followed Vinicius and looked away from the horrible mess he’d made of the giant monster’s face. He used his hands to keep its fat body from squishing him, and Mia occasionally had to do the same. It was warm, its dark skin leathery and thick, and a glance down showed it actually had feet, or at least talons, that stuck out from the sides of its belly. The only way it could get over bloodgrip and not rip its stomach open, probably.
“You should eat,” Vinicius said.
“Why do you care?”
He glanced over his shoulder with a snarl.
“You’re a liability if drained.”
“I ate a few days ago, and I haven’t been injured. Good enough for a human for months, right?”
“You’re not human.”
“Hey…” Fuck, it pissed her off hearing him say that. Pissed her off more, because he was probably right.
“And you use that aura frequently.”
“It…” It might have been draining her ‘reserves’ to use her aura. If that was true, she probably should eat.
She did not want to eat the heart of a giant hellbeast. If eating a demon heart hit her with their memories, the fuck sort of things would she see if she ate the heart of a hellbeast? Maybe nothing, since they didn’t store resonance, and maybe it was the resonance giving her the memories? Ugh, where was David to figure this stuff out for her.
On the other side of a canyon a couple kilometers wide and as long as Canada. Ugh.
“If that dream,” she said between grunts as she pushed against the beast’s body, “is actually a vision, then… is that something that’s going to happen?”
He snorted. “No one can see the future.”
“Really? I figured with all the craziness of the afterlife, which is all really magical in a sick, twisted sorta way, seeing the future would be possible.”
“No one can see the future. No one can change the past. No one.”
“No one can? That… makes sense.” She’d heard David go on this rant before. Violating the ‘chain of causality’ was a gimmick used by poor writers, according to him. She never really minded it when stories did dumb stuff like that, but it sent poor David right up the wall, almost as much as multiverse stuff did. And alternate universe stuff. And… a lot of stuff.
“No one.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
He snorted again, slipped past the tail end of the giant beast, kept walking, and said nothing. He was the opposite of Zel. Never wanted to talk, explain himself, listen to himself talk, anything. It’d been a great way for Mia to learn about Hell, Zel’s constant boasting and whatnot, but Vinicius didn’t give her an inch.
“Think my brother got the vision, too?”
He clucked once as he snorted.
“The woman wasn’t me,” she said, “and the angel that killed her, a man, they… they were ruthless.”
“Angels are ruthless.”
Finally, some information.
“You’ve met angels before?”
Another snort. So much for that.
Sighing, she slipped out from around the big fat tail of the wurm, and looked ahead. More tunnel. Ugh.
Vinicius did not want to talk. Much as she didn’t want to talk to him, she did want to talk about all the things that’d happened to her. Not Hannah or Adron or Kas. They’d had that conversation, and Vinicius was a cold, heartless asshole about it. But other things, like the vision, or her strange abilities, or Hell in general, she wanted to talk about those things.
But her traveling partner wasn’t interested in that, either. Far as he was concerned, she could be the literal key to saving the universe from who knew what, and all he wanted to do was get her to release him so he could go back to being a murdering, raping psychopath!
She wanted to talk about the electric jolt the vision had sent through her, the same jolt she’d felt when she’d touched David. And she couldn’t. Fuck.
She hoped David was having a better time than her.