The two of them climbed, walked paths, slipped between rocks in ditches, and weaved around boulders and unusual metal growths. Hell did love to show off her artistic talents, and her obsession with the macabre. Black skulls on metal poles, and more of them the higher they climbed.
“Does Hell drop new souls at this place often?” she asked, and she gestured around at the various metal poles growing out of the mountain rock. Hell did things like grow statues and stuff in areas where things happened, where intent or emotion came to dramatic conclusions, things like that.
Vinicius clicked yes.
“Then… we might run into other demons?”
“Yes. You will hide.”
“Hide. Right. Hide.” She could hide. Her silk wrap was permanently red now, so it blended into the red lighting and blood-stained rock and stones of Hell pretty well. Red hair and freckles helped, too!
She groaned. None of that would help much. If she was so much as spotted by anyone that wasn’t Vinicius, there was a very good chance she’d end up dead and eaten by a demon, or a Cainite. Her only option was to stay close to Vinicius, very close. That meant going up the mountain.
They got up there, and Mia found a boulder to hide behind, as Vinicius unleashed chaos.
No, wait, not unleashed. Joined. The top of the mountain was wide, football-field wide, mostly flat, with a raised circular edge of rocks and boulders. Nothing a person couldn’t climb over, but anyone who did met a sharp drop that was difficult to climb down. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the two dozen demons pouring up over the edge into the arena, and feasting.
How had she not seen them? Around twenty-five other demons ran around the scattering, screaming humans, and unleashed death on them with reckless abandon. Some vrats, lots of imps and grems, gargoyles, a couple tigers, a bat girl or two, a few brutes, and hundreds of humans running around in a panic. Worse than a panic, a horrified stampede that mostly went in a circle. Some desperate humans tried to climb over the rocks on the circle edge, but were quickly eviscerated; the demons didn’t eat them yet, but killed as many humans as they could. The only humans that were going to get out alive were the ones willing to run and jump over the rocks circling the mountaintop.
A few did. One of them even came Mia’s way, jumped almost straight at her, over her, and past her. The mountain was not kind, and the woman let out a death cry as she realized she’d just thrown herself down the side of a cruel, jagged mountainside. It was at least a fifty feet before she hit the ground, and kept going.
Mia forced herself to look down at her feet, and crouched as low as she could to the circle’s outer edge, along its outside. She’d seen enough of this carnage before, when she first came to Hell, and in half a dozen other places and times. But she had to pay attention, at least to make sure no one came at her, noticed her, tried to eat her, anything.
And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t help but peek, if only to see what Vinicius did. She shouldn’t have.
The demons didn’t use a sin aura. Maybe if they did, they could have convinced some humans to stand and fight. Maybe the other demons were too hungry to waste energy on one, even if it meant a meal escaping. Whatever the reason, there was no violence between the demons, and no sin aura to cause any.
It was like watching sharks work together to eat a school of fish. The blood flowed. Limbs flew across the air. Heads toppled. Guts coated the ground, and screams were cut short by–
“Crazy,” a voice said.
Mia squeaked and turned around. Oh fuck.
Beside her, squatted a demon. A man. An incubus.
“We meet again,” he said, smiling in that half seductive, half dangerous way the sex demons had a habit of.
“M-Meet again?” Oh shit oh shit. Scream? Call Vinicius for help? She’d gotten so distracted by everything, she’d stopped looking around herself to make sure no one had spotted her. And now she might just be a dead girl. Double fuck.
The incubus had a sword strapped to his back, and wore a few pieces of meera armor, a slab of the bent and crude metal across one half of his chest, and some random bits of it strapped to his arms and thighs. A few inches over six feet tall, he was, as all incubi were, absolutely utterly handsome and gorgeous. He had the long, straight, thin dreadlocks that were actually half-inch-thick black hair tendrils that ended in sharp tips, and combined with his masculine jaw and dreamy eyes, he looked straight off a book cover for a steamy romance set in some stereotypical tropical country where the men all clearly wanted to pleasure the lonely and sexually frustrated office lady who’d been forced to go on vacation by her boss because she worked too hard and never took care of herself.
“I was enjoying an orgy with Saldavin when you walked in. You were Zel’s new pet.”
“Oh. Oh! Um… hi?” Oh my. She’d seen a bunch of incubi with a betrayer girl, that first encounter. They’d been getting their dicks in her, anyway they could, and that’d included two in her poor ass. And considering their dicks had been nearly as big as a vrat’s, that couldn’t have been easy on the woman. But whoever she’d been, she’d loved it.
“Came here for the feast?” He gestured past the boulders they hid behind.
“No! No no. Vinicius needs to eat, and–”
The incubus’s eyes opened wide.
“Oh. Diogo was right. You escaped the spire with Vinicius.” With a weary sigh, the incubus peeked over the rocks, winced, and squatted down beside her again. “Scary.”
Incubi, or volarins according to Zel, had red skin with very little darkness to it. They were soft by demon standards, even muscular ones like the one in front of Mia. No wings, no spikes, just two small black horns, and mostly human feet with short black claws to match the ones on his hands. He did have a tail, though, long and skinny and ending in a tiny spade. The whole look matched his red and black demon eyes very well.
“Diogo… w-wait, Diogo? Diogo’s alive?”
The incubus gestured for her to quiet down.
“Yes, he’s alive. Missing an arm, but he’s the new spire ruler, regardless.” After a shrug, the incubus gestured to himself. “I’m Faustinus, by the way.”
“Faust?”
“Inus.” He smiled.
She smiled, too. No, wait. Do not trust!
“W-Why aren’t you killing me, then? I uh…” Shit, she said the wrong thing first. “I mean, what did Diogo tell you?”
“That there are two unmarked souls, short, red hair, freckles, and they are to be killed.”
“That… sounds about right, I guess. Then why aren’t you doing that?”
“Fuck Diogo, that’s why. He killed Leos.”
“Oh. So–” She winced and covered her ears as a feminine scream cut through the noise of violence only fifty feet away. Better to focus on this strange conversation than listen to that. This very lucky conversation. Any other demon might have just killed her on sight. Then again, any other demon was already in the arena, killing, or elsewhere, avoiding strong demons so they wouldn’t risk getting eaten, too. Why was this incubus talking to her, then? “So, you’re going to… pretend you didn’t see me?”
“Not like I can really risk doing anything to you. No way I’d chance pissing off a child of the Old Ones, especially not that one.” He shivered and poked his head up over the rocks again as the last of the human screams faded. “Now we see if peace lasts, or we get a massacre.”
“Get a massacre? Isn’t that what just happened?”
“No. That was preparing dinner.”
She frowned. “Those were people.”
The incubus stared at her, squatted down low only two feet from her, and smiled. Not the flirtatious smile he had on a moment before, but surprise, complete with a raised eyebrow that looked a little too much like a movie actor might do.