Livian squatted down beside Yulia, and pulled her off him. Gently. Mia stared, blinking, as the ten-foot demoness treated the little demoness with kindness. It was paralyzing. Yulia turned into Livian, clicked at her a few times, rubbed her eyes on Livian’s shoulders, and ran down the tunnel, half gliding with her speed. She wanted to get away.
Livian set a hand on Galon’s shoulder, kissed his forehead, and ripped out his heart.
An angel heart. It didn’t glow, or have special gold lines, or anything that gave it away as an angel heart, except that it was a little bigger than a human’s. But Vin, Adron, and Kas stared at the hunk of bleeding flesh in the woman’s palms, and licked their lips. There was a lot of power in angel hearts, and a lot of souls in Hell were convinced if you ate one, you got special powers. A tempting meal.
Livian gave everyone a glare, and nodded down the tunnel.
“Come on,” she said, and followed after her boss, heart in hand.
“I am beyond confused,” Adron said.
“As am I,” Kas said, growling as he inched a little closer to Galon’s body. “What happened?”
“Vin,” Mia said, “can you join the others down in the tunnel?” She almost said please, but that’d only decrease his chances of doing what she asked, especially with other demons nearby to witness possible weakness.
The colossus growled in his throat, shared a couple glances with two much smaller demons, and left. Kas and Adron watched after him, probably waiting for Vinicius to run back and eat them, but he didn’t. He disappeared down the tunnel.
“I can’t believe you guys are alive!” Mia almost jumped and clapped, but the splash of angel blood under her sandals ripped the idea out through her guts. Sighing, she ran a hand down Adron’s shoulder, the burned side, and up it to touch his face. “Does it hurt?”
“No.” He winked at her with his only eye. It’d have looked like a blink, if not for how he scrunched up the muscle of his good eyebrow. “It can’t look too good, though.”
“It looks… Well, I mean, it’s not ugly! You look good!” She smiled up at him and pat him on the chest. Demons healed a little differently than people did. The burn marks covering half his body didn’t look like nasty scar tissue, but an array of swirling scorch marks, dark red against the near black parts of his skin.
The sad part was how the burn covered a piece of his face, namely over one of his eyes. That eyelid would probably never open again.
“That’s good. I’d hate it if your new friend was the reason I looked ugly.”
She chuckled, weak and soft, but it felt nice to laugh, to do anything that didn’t mean staring down at Galon’s body, or think about the things she’d just done.
“You summoned the horde?” he asked. “Like a spire would?”
“I… did, yeah. Not nearly as strong as a spire call, I figure, but… I did.”
“And the clothes?”
“An angel rune. They have a few, and apparently I can use them. Did you see me in the black armor?”
“I did.” He squatted in front of her, nodding as he looked up at her. “And all the fire outside? That… geyser, shooting out of the ground? The little mountain?”
“Destroyed little mountain,” Kas said. “All your doing?”
“I… I mean… I guess? I don’t really know for sure. I just… played the strings, those things that I can feel, that let me create auras. When I saw Galon get hurt, I played them super hard, because I knew I had to save him and Yosepha, and…” And she failed.
“Did you know him well?” Adron asked.
“Not really. I only talked to him a few times, but he was… he was a gabriem, and really, really nice. And smart. And… And just…” She forced herself to look. She had to look. It wasn’t her fault, and she would not carry the guilt, no matter how much she wanted to. But she still had to look.
She stood over the corpse of the angel, reached down, touched his crimson wing, and bit down a sob. But another hit her, summoned by the wet texture of the angel’s blood soaking her fingertips.
“Romakus is right,” Kas said. “Tacitus will come investigate. We need to leave.”
Mia didn’t answer, eyes locked on Galon’s closed eyes, but somehow she managed to not look down at the hole in his chest. Livian had been surgical removing his heart, limiting damage to his body, but there were only so many ways you could remove a heart from a corpse with your claws.
“We didn’t expect to run into you like this,” Adron said, “but we did. So, what’s the plan?”
A spark of energy shot up through her limbs. Slowly, Mia turned and smiled at the two of them.
“You want to come with me?”
“After what happened at the spire?” Adron laughed and shrugged. “Damn right.” Much as he tried to keep eye contact with her, he looked down for a second, a flicker that waved a flag over his head. He was thinking about Hannah.
“When David and I fell out of the spire,” she said, “a gorgala he knows saved us, but she couldn’t get us out of the canyon until someone who… who looks a lot like the rider saved all three of us. A woman, in aera armor.” Adron and Kas traded glances; Kas did it without eyes, of course. She continued. “She told me I need to get to the Forgotten Place, or… or we’re all dead.”
Silence, with a constant, healthy dose of raging rumbles from outside. The storm continued.
“All dead?” Adron asked.
“All dead. And whoever the woman was, she knew what she was talking about. Vin confirmed. So, we’re heading to False Gate, ’cause we think we can get across the sea from there.” Nodding, she stood up, got one step down the tunnel to follow after Romakus, and then turned around. Past the curve of the tunnel, the inferno raged, and the music called to her. Beside her, Galon’s corpse sat, doomed to melt away to a skeleton in a couple of days.
She leaned down, kissed his forehead where Livian had, and left him. Kas and Adron followed.
Adron got beside her, Kas behind her, and they fell into a natural rhythm. It was almost like she hadn’t lost them.
Lost them? Powerful word choice there, Mia. They’re not yours.
“You really did all that?” Adron asked, gesturing back. “Only reason I didn’t run into those fire tornadoes to start a fight with an angel was Kas. He resisted the horde call.”
She smiled back at the huge shark dinosaur, and he snorted once, walking close to her on all fours, using his long arms to easily plant some weight on his palms. It wasn’t the same walking style as a tregeera, who walked like cats when they went on all fours, but more like someone had crossed a crocodile with a gorilla. Big arms for bracing the ground, but with a long tail that flowed behind him.
As awesome as Adron was, bigger and stronger than most vrats, he wasn’t on quite the same level as a sarkarin like Kas. But still, it was a surprise Kas resisted the horde call, when everyone else had succumbed except the tetrads and Vin.