Bad Influence (Seven Deadly Sins #2) ✅ Completed

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Door Opens

  

The sins swirled around Asher, black and red, not quite touching but surrounding their master all the same.

“I was hoping you would put up a fight.” Asher’s voice was multi-layered, like there were half a dozen people speaking at once. The mocking condescension of the last few minutes was gone. It was replaced with something far scarier.

This was Asher the collector.

“It makes the anguish of your soul far sweeter when I tear it apart.”

I felt the skin on the back of my neck itch and grow hot. It spread like wildfire until it engulfed my entire back.

“Asher, don’t. You’re going too far,” Dante jumped up and rushed forward.

He wheeled on his brother, his face a rictus of hate and disgust. “There is no where I wouldn’t tread to bring your destruction,” he seethed as he lifted his hand.

I jerked like I’d been lassoed and felt myself being dragged forward. Asher reached for me and the second his hands touched mine I felt the entire world explode around me in a kaleidoscope of broken glass and pain.

I felt my body split in half as the door on my back broke open. The impact threw me high into the air. Winds, hot and full of sulfur surrounded me as a black hole appeared behind me. Wrath and Lust rose up to surround me in the night sky, keeping me in place as the door to hell cracked open.

“Eliza!” Dante yelled.

I screamed as I felt something elemental push through my entire being, cracking me open like a chest spreader. It rose through me until I felt my eyes open impossibly wide and the abyss poured out.

“No!” I screamed, long and tortured as I felt the monsters clawing through me, trying to escape their eternal prison. Hundreds, thousands of voices, animalistic and hungry invaded my mind, threatening to break it. They were so hungry, but not for food or even blood. They wanted souls – all the souls of the earth.

And they were coming for mine first.

In my mind’s eye I saw them – the creatures of the pit, horrible and beyond imagination. Some were nothing but skeletons, twisted and distorted and put together like a bad Picasso puzzle. Others were fleshy and terrifying, with dozens of mouths filled with rows and rows of teeth bigger than a man’s arm. I could see the remnants of devoured souls speared on their tips.

I felt the tears run down my face and the monsters laughed at my pain. They were rising up and were close enough to see the earthly plane. Through their eyes I could see myself, my back alight with Asher’s marking, a hole widening before it, their only way in.

And suddenly Dante was there, rising in front of me, grabbing onto me. The sins swirled around us, but Dante seemed not to notice them or care. They couldn’t do anything to him.  

“You have to close your eyes, Eliza. Close them now.”

“I can’t,” I cried. I felt the power pouring out of them, lighting the way, keeping the door open for the monsters.

“Yes you can, Eliza. If anyone can do it, it’s you. Close your eyes. Don’t show them the way in.”

“Dante…” I felt the sob burst from me and the creatures felt my pain and the reveled in it, moving faster, surging ahead. My eyes felt like they were burning, two hot coals in my head, a lantern to the pain and destruction of the whole world.

“Eliza, please,” Dante begged. It was the first time I’d ever heard him sound so desperate. “Please, shut your eyes. You’ll die if you don’t.”