The COMPLETE Witching Pen Series, Boxed Set (33 page)

Again?
“Not long enough... And I still don't know who you are.”

He ignored her and leaned into her instead, pressing his body against hers. She fought the urge to throw up. He also had a raging hard-on. Great. That would be the bloodthirsty angel gene shining through.

She briefly wondered if Gwain would hear her screaming his name from all the way down here, wherever 'down here' was.

He rubbed himself against her hip, like a cat on a post. The leather he wore felt softer than she'd expected.

“Do you like the pants?”

He wanted to talk about his wardrobe?

Talking's good,
reasoned her inner-voice.
Keep him talking for as long as possible.
 

“No, I don't.”

“Shame … he really liked you.”

“Your clothes have personae?”

“This item did… John, I think his name was…”

Oh, GOD, no—
“No!” She bucked, trying to get him off her … too late. She swung her head as far as she could to the left, no longer able to control her guts, and vomited.

It was surprisingly difficult to heave whilst chained upright to a wall.

His laugh was deep, cruel and goading. “Here.” He fumbled behind him for something and came back with a wet rag, which he stuffed into her mouth and squeezed. “Rinse.”

Stale tasting water surged over her tongue, choking her as she tried not to swallow.

He pushed himself off her and strode away.

Mary spat the stuff out.
Stay calm – none of this is worse than your nightmares.
 

“You're lying,” she croaked, her voice tight from retching. “The police have his body.”

“Not anymore.”

Shit.
“Why?”

“Why what? Why kill him?”

So he
had
killed him.
She nodded.

“Because he touched what's mine.
You
are
mine.
”

“He
never
touched me!” And finally, anger rose within her, overtaking the fear.

“He thought about it.”

“And that was enough for you to murder him?”
Sicko.
“What about Sophia, and Leonard? Think they wanted in my knickers too?”

“First of all,
I
didn't murder him. I don't go up there… Well, sometimes I do, but not as a general rule. I have humans I call on to be on mutilation duty,” he grinned.

“Minions?” she spat out.

“Something like that – madmen and lunatics; those that the rest of the world think need to be sectioned; demons that scare the crap out of people…”

She thought of the walrus-monster that had captured her, then gingerly looked around to see if it was lurking.

“Now, Leonard McDonald … he was one evil son-of-a-bitch through and through. Don't think for one second he doesn't deserve to burn in Hell because he does.” He leaned forward towards her, and even from three feet away, she felt intimidated.

“He liked little boys,” he whispered, as if that excused him being tortured and murdered à la Death By A Thousand Cuts. He shook his head and sighed. “Leonard was one big coincidence – he had nothing to do with anything. He just happened to live in that building; his time was up, that was all. And God wouldn’t take him. I get all the rejects – lucky me.”

“And Sophia?” she asked through gritted teeth. God, she wanted to kill this nutter … this … angel? She examined his wings. Was he even an angel? And how did one go about killing them?

Gwain's name was on the tip of her tongue – he'd probably know how to kill him – but there was no way to call it out without Sicko hearing it, and she didn't want Gwain to end up a pair of pants.

“Sophia…” His grin disappeared. “Face of a child, but not a child. Sophia is not human – she's a Totilemi, and she's not dead. The body they have is an illusion; human minds are so easy to bend. I'm still trying to extract information from her.”

Totilemi.
One of the seven demon tribes, she recalled. But which one? The one whose gift was knowledge, if she remembered correctly. “So, the murders … they were all killed the same way. You staged them? To get me into that jail?”

“Very good!” he smiled. He genuinely looked proud of her. It did nothing to ease Mary’s feelings of fucked-upness about him. “Gateways to here are temperamental – they move about – but one had just aligned itself with the prison.”

Holy crap. “And you… Who are you?”

“Oh, Ymari,” he shook his head. “You're asking the wrong question.”

She paused. “Okay then… Who am I?”

He beamed another smile, and she suddenly got the feeling she'd just agreed to play a game in which she didn't know the rules. Fuck it.

“Let me tell you a little story…”

She looked up at her arms and wondered what happened to limbs if they stayed numb for too long…

“Once upon a time, before even time itself, there was no separation, no duality, no wrong or right, no dark and light. There was only chaos – primeval chaos: a mass of dark matter with no sense of structure. It’s also known as ‘what came before’.” He studied her closely. “Enter God, with his entrepreneurial ideas, and his creativity. He split the chaos in two and shone his light on one half. Bathed in his light, chaos could see what it couldn't before, and chaos was moulded into order. Duality was created. One half of existence remained chaotic and dark, the other half was transformed into order and light, and all of Creation was birthed in the light.

“But chaos is what chaos does. It had been torn apart; separated from its original state, and its energy was incomplete, unruly and wild without the other half of itself. Every now and then, a little bit of that dark matter that God had rejected, would hurtle across The Boundary into the light, in order to seek that half which had been stolen. The Boundary was the line that now kept order and chaos separate, and all were forbidden to cross it.

“Millennia passed, or the equivalent of – there is no time in Heaven – and then Eden fell.”

He stared at her, or maybe through her, as if he were chasing a memory.

“Man fell because of one bright spark who thought it acceptable to cross The Boundary. You know him as Adam. It’s said that he found Eve on the other side, corrupted by ‘what came before’ … but no one really knows – no one else was there. Regardless, God cast all of mankind out of Heaven, and Eden was no more. Eden became Earth. From that point on, God deemed man incapable of making decisions for themselves, so did it for them—”

“With the Witching Pen,” she interrupted.

He raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Angels became split in their alliance, some choosing to fall and aid mankind, and when
that
happened, Ymari,
that
is when I came into play.”

His eyes gleamed as if he were getting to the juicy part of the story – maybe he just really liked to talk about himself.

“I was the first being that God created from the emergence of order and light. I was the first angel.”

Oh, no!

Her breathing turned shallow.
The first angel.
 

Her mind raced back to what Katarra had told them the last time her life was semi-normal:

“…Satan was the first angel, and the only one God trusted to remind humans of the consequences and responsibility of having free will…”
 

Oh, my God –
this was Satan.
That meant, that this was Hell. And not the lesser hell dimensions that demons inhabited, but
actual
Hell.

What am I doing in Hell?
 

“When God understood that the fallen angels were encouraging humans to use their free will, he ordered me into the bowels of the human dimension to oversee their choices, to be ruler of their sins, purveyor of the consequence for every decision they make.

“I pleaded with him not to send me on this dark mission – I am made of
light
for heaven's sake. To be cut off from God and order so entirely – I couldn't bear the thought of it. So he seduced me with a proposition.”

He –
Satan
– made his way towards Mary once more, all his attention focused solely on her now, as he stood directly in front of her. “God took me to The Boundary, reached into the very centre of it, and pulled out the
nucleus
of primeval chaos – the very source of its existence. In front of me, he cut it in two, gave half to me, and kept the other half for himself. He told me he would form it into light and order, just as he had done in the beginning, and whenever I felt lost, I was to reach for my half and remember my connection to God; that I was holding the other half of his light. He vowed that when the race of man was no more, I could rejoin him in Heaven. Well … how does one say no to God?

“I conceded. He stripped me of my title and put me here.” He waved his arms at his surroundings, and his expression grew angry. “In the meantime, he created another angel to take my place – the last angel he would ever create – one who would be so pure, so strong, so
dedicated
to God's mission… I was spitting mad and running on bitter jealousy – that was
my
seat next to God, it didn't belong to some
child,
some golden do-gooder taking my place as I became cut-off from Heaven … from everything God is.” He stepped into her space and placed both hands on the wall either side of her head. “Don't you see, Ymari, I was the one who gave God
everything
. I was the most loyal of all his angels.”

Mary was pretty sure all she could see were psychotic tendencies, but nodded her head to appease him.

His mouth twisted in a cruel half-smile. “I later heard that the last angel abandoned God – that he chose to fall to aid mankind.” He snorted. “Serves the Omnipresent One right, don't you think? Assuming anyone could take my place…

“I was raging. I wanted to spite God, so I did.” His eyes gleamed. “With my half of the nucleus he’d given me, I created someone to share the darkness with me; a queen to rule by my side – an angel of my own.”

He paused, seemingly for dramatic affect. Was he waiting for her to say something? “Er… how did that work out for you?”

“Badly, Ymari… Until now. You have to understand that God is the only one permitted to create. Lokoli committed the ultimate sin when she wrote her seven tribes into existence, but they were demons. For me to create an angel – an actual
angel
– in
my own image
was blasphemous to say the least. It was an act worthy of my head being spiked atop the gates of Heaven … and it was the best way to hurt God that I could think of: I would become
my own
God.”

He searched her eyes, as if looking for some kind of understanding. Of course, she had none.

“I birthed an angel into being, using my will to give her life; my blood and the marrow from my bones to give her form… and She. Was.
Beautiful
.”

He brushed her hair with his long fingers. That unwelcome feeling she'd felt on first seeing him had taken root once more in the pit of her stomach, not least because a new, very sick realisation dawned in her mind.

“I made her to rule by my side, so I wouldn't be alone – a queen of darkness, my own demon bride. Her hair was the colour of the midnight sky, her eyes, the bluest you'll ever see … just like mine.”

“No,”
she whispered, turning her head away from him, but he palmed her chin and grasped her cheeks, forcing her back to meet his gaze.

“Why did you run from me, Ymari?”

“Don't,” she whimpered, scrambling to make sense of it all. “This is insane … you're insane.”

“You fled,” he continued, as if he hadn't heard her. “Did curiosity get the better of you? As soon as you caught a whiff of a better place, a
Heaven
, you just had to spread your wings and fly? Was that it?”

“I don't know anything you're telling me.” She tasted her tears on her lips. Bastard. She'd sworn he wouldn't see them. He – him –
Satan
. If what he was saying was true, that meant…

She closed her eyes against the awful possibility.

“Look at me!” He painfully squeezed her face, and she opened her eyes to meet his own accusatory ones. “You were
my
angel … an angel of
darkness
. To fly to Heaven of all places – were you mad? Your very existence is an impossibility.
No one
was supposed to discover you.”

Her cheeks were starting to go numb. “Please,” she pleaded. “I don't remember any of this.”

He eased off a little then, and seemed to gather himself. Letting go of her face, he straightened up, never once taking his eyes off her. “You escaped. Went overground into the human world when it wasn't permitted, but you didn't stop there – you crossed
all
dimensions and travelled straight to Heaven. You went where I was forbidden to follow.” His words were cloaked in bitter envy. “Of course, you were discovered. There was no possible way you could have entered Heaven without God sensing your trespass. He created a living, breathing abyss forged from the same black matter you came from, specifically made to track you down and swallow you up.
You
… my botched creation.”

A stark image of her legs dangling over some huge, black, throbbing yawning by a precipice, flashed through her mind, but it was gone before she could explore it further. Besides, her brain had become stuck on the word
botched.
She was a botched creation. Well, she’d always wanted to know what she was. Nice.

“Then, as my punishment for creating you, he closed all avenues from Heaven to Hell forever, ensuring I would be trapped here for all of eternity. Even after mankind is gone, I will still be here, without purpose … without light. But that wasn’t what cut the deepest, my rebellious bride.” He ran his thumb along her bottom lip in a lover's caress, but his eyes were positively murderous. He brought his mouth to her ear. “Did you think I wouldn't find out,” he whispered, “about the angel you betrayed me with?”

She cried out as he dug his thumbnail into her lip, hard, breaking skin. “That you bonded with him? That you
merged
with him?” He hooked his nail into the cut, and she whimpered. “Did he feel
good
between your
legs
?” he spat out, then he descended on her mouth with his own, sucking harshly, lapping up the blood he'd drawn, staking his ownership of her.