Sighing, she buried her forehead against Vin’s back, and watched the dead flesh sit in her palm. The higher the number, the less guilty she felt about Adron killing the soul, but the worst the new memories would be. The lower the number, the memories might not be so bad, but then she’d feel horrible that someone who was only maybe a 3 or 4 had to die like prey to a predator.
She bit into the heart. A murderer. A woman who’d poisoned her husband, and judging from the memory, the man did not deserve it. A classic story, something so cliche it was hard to believe it’d actually happened. But it had.
Of all the new memories she’d gained, a man going to sleep peacefully and never waking up ranked pretty low on the fucked-up list. Worst of all, the fucked up shit some demons did, the ones who enjoyed torture and rape, their memories weren’t the worst, and the only reason Mia’s brain wasn’t ripped to mulch by the human memories was its strange ability to file the new memories away like books in a library. She only had to see them once, and once she had, they were locked up, and she was happy to leave them locked up.
“We’re almost there,” Livian said. The four-armed ten-foot demon slowed until she stood near Adron, and she looked at Mia as she gestured forward. “The Black Valley will be rough going.”
Groaning, Mia stepped off Vin’s back spikes and walked beside him instead; her weight didn’t mean much to Vin, but still. She patted her egg, checked it for any scratches or dents, and looked back up at the Zel look-alike. That wasn’t really a fair comparison. Livian and Zel were both bolstara tetrads, so they both had four arms, hooves, no tail, a quartet of righteous horns, and the only obvious difference was Livian had short dreadlocks and no piercings. There were more, subtle differences in the shape of their faces just likes humans would have, but they were hard to notice when red eyes, black horns, and dark red skin were still so novel.
She definitely like Livian more than Zel, though, for sure.
“Rough?” Mia asked. “Rougher than Death’s Grip?”
“It’s flatter,” Adron said. “There’s that.”
“That vision of another unmarked dying showed a bit of the place. It looked… gross. It looked like a swamp, and there were trenches with guts in them, and everything looked super dark, and…” Her voice trailed off as they stepped around the base of the last mountain of Death’s Grip.
Black Valley. Yeah, it was definitely a black valley, a dip in the ground that raised only just slightly on the inner and outer edges of Hell; it was so damn flat she could see all the way to both sides. It didn’t look like it’d be hard to get into, just a casual walk down a gentle slope, but the black fog was so thick, it looked disturbingly close to one of those pictures of underwater lakes, brine pools.
“Your bother is crossing the Grave Valley, right?” Livian asked. “The fog isn’t so bad, there.”
“You’ve been there?” Mia asked.
“I have.”
“What’s it like?”
“Azailia and Zel shared a lot of ideas and views, including letting demons make their own little tribes to fight among themselves. It’s a decent way to weed out the weak. But in the Grave Valley, the groups are larger, maybe a few for each bailiff.”
“I uh… meant what it looks like.”
Laughing, she leaned down to her side and grinned at Mia.
“A lot better than the Black Valley.”
Mia frowned back up at her, which just made the huge demoness laugh more. Okay, yes, she was better than Zel, and Julisa too, but she was still a bitch.
“The Grave Valley,” she said, “is filled with Hell’s monuments to the surface world’s graveyard. Tombstones, mausoleums, dark forests, small churches, and a lingering fog that permeates.”
“Sounds like… Halloween.”
“Kinda,” Adron said.
“David loves Halloween.” Who the fuck was she kidding. She loved Halloween and spooky shit. And candy. And pumpkin spice lattes, but she’d never admit that out loud. “The Black Valley isn’t like that?”
Livian shook her head. “Not in the slightest. It is an endless swamp of rotten blood, with remnants churning in the crevices of mud, ripped apart by the shifting mounds so their insides decorate the landscape. An infinite supply of gore, supplied by your precious humans above.”
Fuck. Mia hung her head and stroked her egg.
“I wish we could trade places with David, then. I’d prefer spooky Halloween stuff.”
“The Grave Valley has its own dangers,” Livian said. “But at least you have a dry place to put your feet, there. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to walk endless mud and blood up to your ankles, with hooves?” She stomped a hoof, and the impact sound of the hard rocky earth of Death’s Grip was satisfying. “And unlike you, I do not have a gorgeous ragarin to carry me.”
Vin snorted, but didn’t so much as glance Livian’s way. In fact, he hadn’t said much since the incident with the angels, no words to Mia or to Romakus or even to Adron or Kasimiro. He did look Mia’s way whenever she got off his back to walk around, but that was it. Something was on his mind, and of course he wouldn’t talk about it, no point in even asking. And when they all parked for the night, exhausted from walking all day and all twilight hours, no one had the energy to even talk or fuck.
So far, this journey sucked.
Sighing, Mia jogged ahead, passed the tiger, some gargoyles, some vrats, a few brutes, Faust and his three incubus buddies, Yulia the bat girl, and Julisa, until she reached Romakus. Before Mia could say anything, her eyes landed on the angel, and the words caught in her throat.
Yosepha walked beside the huge gorujin tetrad, wearing her white toga potram clothes, no longer stained by copious amounts of blood. Her wings hadn’t regrown yet, and according to her, wouldn’t for some time, small fleshy stubs with ruined tips, like someone hadn’t cut them off so much as ripped them off. Maybe that was what happened, but Yosepha refused to talk about it.
And the angel still had on the pouch around her neck, like a necklace. Or an anchor, judging from the way the angel frequently fidgeted with it. Someone had given it to her, but of course, she refused to talk about that, too.
“Romakus,” Mia said.