A sneeze ripped through me, and I winced at the sudden sting lighting along my side wound. Grumbling, I opened my purse to find my orange prescription bottle, picked out a little white pill, and popped it into my mouth. I sneezed again, then began cursing softly into my hand.
I sat at my desk in IMOR's quiet, sun-warmed lobby. The woman currently at my partition was covered in a ghastly cloud of perfume and the flowery scent was burning my eyes. She was filling out paperwork for the advertisement department and I was waiting for the document in question so I could deliver it to Martha—as unpleasant as that task sounded. I tried to retain a professional mien but the sneezing was persistent and I quickly became annoyed when the woman wrote the wrong information into the blanks and had to ask for another form to start again. I think her perfume had honeysuckle in it. My allergies were in full riot.
I hadn't spoken to Darius after returning from Baba Yaga's, but I did leave the address on the table with a coaster holding it in place, and this morning the receipt had been gone, so I knew Darius had found it and was undoubtedly checking the viability of the possible lead. I settled into my squeaky chair, cracking the chalky pill between my molars as I shoved a wad of tissues under my nose to block out the smell. I could only theorize the Sin's reaction if Saule's information proved helpful. Darius would want to know where I had gotten it, and he wouldn't be happy.
My mood was sour. My mother had called not twenty minutes after I arrived at IMOR. The first words out of her mouth had been questions about Tara, and if I had heard from her. Bitter and heartbroken, I had lied. I told her I had heard from my sister, that she was out of the country completing part of her residency in a disadvantaged town. The lie was crude and wouldn't hold up to scrutiny, but my mother had bought it. I had hung up after we exchanged terse goodbyes.
Dante's book was splayed open by the keyboard, loose pages twitching in the A/C drafts. A notebook was propped next to it, held by a fresh rubber band with a pen hooked through it. Impatient, I snapped the band, but the woman didn't notice, flipping to another page as she fiddled with the pen in her hand. I sneezed again.
I was rereading the book from a different perspective, considering the small details of Dante's interactions with the demons of the inferno with revived fascination and a critical eye. In the third canto, Dante wrote of the Gate of Hell, of the way into the weeping city, into the eternal pain, a way among the lost souls. A gate is a way through, a metaphoric beginning—perhaps even a herald. As I scratched out Italian verse in my notebook and considered the stanzas, my eye was again and again drawn to the line "Nothing before me but the eternal things, and I eternally last."
I thought of broken, fallen angels who stepped into our world from veils of black flame. Men—and women—who wore the monikers of sin and heralded certain doom for the souls they bound in their contracts. They could whisper your desires into being and work wonders for your dreams—but your demise was sealed. Your end was assured. There was no hope for life once you entered a contract.
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. Abandon all hope, you who enter here.
A clatter of feminine heels brought my head up, and I hastily hid my bundle of tissues in my lap. When I caught sight of Amoroth storming the building with her black-suited bodyguards manning the entrance, anxiety scoured thoughts of Dante from my head.
The Sin of Lust was outwardly impeccable as ever—but her anger and frustration rode before her on a gust of unseasonably chilly air. The woman at the counted blinked and looked around as well, startled by the abrupt draft. The Sin's violet gaze was fixed solely on me.
"Leave and forget my face," Amoroth snarled at the woman, throwing a hand toward the doors beyond her. The woman abandoned her partially completed form and fled in a cloud of putrid honeysuckle, her arms and legs jerking awkwardly at the fiercely given command until she was out of sight. That left me utterly alone with the Sin of Lust.
"Where is Darius?" Amoroth demanded as she slowly and carefully braced her palms upon the partition's granite slab. A steady vibration shifted beneath my chair, causing the pens and pencils in their cup to click and tap together.
"I don't know," I told her, which was the absolute truth. I had no idea where Darius was, and though I had my suspicions, Amoroth wasn't entitled to those. I gave her an annoyed sniff as I straightened a slim stack of blank letterheads. Her eyes darkened. "I have work to do."
The crack of Amoroth's fist breaking the granite shot through my veins like the shock of a livewire on bare skin. I was standing and my back was against the cold archive door, chair listing uselessly between us. "I said where is Darius?"
Her words slithered into my skull in a familiar twist of cajoling ribbons, but I was prepared this time. When the velvet nature of her thoughts drew taut as steel, attempting to rip my will from me, I held my tongue until tears leaked from under my lashes. Amoroth straightened as she waited, brushing granite dust from her slender fingers while her expression remained hard and unforgiving.
"And I said I don't know," I spat, hand jerking wildly as I wiped away the stray tears. "I have work to do."
The Sin began to walk around the partition but paused, head whipping back to stare at the skeleton of steel beams above the lobby. Cold crept over me and I shivered, exhaling a thick plume of steam as Amoroth flicked a hand toward the beams. A surge of heat and energy rose in a wave, invisible but for the ripples it caused in the air as it responded to the Sin's gesture and shot upwards. Something exploded overhead and I ducked, watching as sparks and slivers of metal rained onto the lobby floor. Had that been the surveillance camera?!
"I don't know what game he's playing," Amoroth murmured—and I gasped, having failed to see her approach. She snatched my wrist in a bruising grip, which caused a yelp of pain to escape me. "Quite frankly, I don't care. I just know it stops here."
The Sin moved, and before I could take a breath of protest I was falling, tripping into smothering blackness. I knew Amoroth had pulled me into the Realm, effectively trapping me in the choking pressure of its ashen folds as the embers and heat scoured the air from my lungs. The tension of her firm grip on my wrist was my only tether to logical sense in the madness of that place—a tether acting more like a noose as she dragged me forward. It was as if the Sin was trying to squeeze me through the cracks in a brick wall; it hurt. It hurt a lot.
We returned to reality with a final tug, my knees scraping something rough and solid as the sun hit my eyes with unfiltered luminosity. I blinked as I tried to clear my vision and make sense of where we were. Amoroth dropped my wrist and I exhaled—but her hand return to squeeze my throat, lifting with unnatural strength. Choking, I scrabbled to grab hold of her arm just as my heels knocked against something solid—then nothing.
"What—?!" My weight hung from Amoroth's single, slender arm, as my feet kicked for the ground and found nothing. The woman was only an inch taller than me, and she was holding me at eye level. Where was the floor?!
The wind tore through us, billowing through Amoroth's tailored suit, throwing my hair out of my face. I coughed, squinting to see through the tears and the sunshine. Amoroth's outline was blurry but the distant coastal horizon was clear, radiant even in the afternoon lighting. Surrounding us was...concrete? Yes, concrete. There were long, short walls of concrete glowing like lightbulb filaments from the sun, soaking up the rays and emitting a palpable heat. Metal ducts and piping created large, orderly lines around the walls and curbs. I could hear equipment running over the sound of the wind's inexhaustible whine.
My feet kicked air again, the wind cold and sharp against my bare legs. My God—we were on a roof. Amoroth had taken us to Klau Tower's roof. The edge of the shorter, more angular Khrest Technologies building was visible from the corner of my streaming eyes. Amoroth's heels were precariously balanced on a corrugated railing—and I hung above nothing, hundreds and hundreds of feet above the thin line of the street below.
"Holy sh—!" I shrieked as my legs peddled ineffectually. Amoroth's grip made it difficult to breathe, but breathing was an ancillary concern at the moment. I reached for the Sin, but she was just beyond the grasp of my shaking hands, a cruel smirk at her glossed lips. I wrapped my arms around hers, praying for leverage, finding little purchase on the bared skin of her wrist. My nails scoured deep, bloody furrows. "What are you doing?!"
The Sin eased me closer until I could feel the heat coming off of her through the wind chill. "I asked where is Darius?"
"I don't know, you crazy harpy! I don't know!" I cried as I scrunched my eyes, refusing to beg her to put me down—though I considered it. Thank God I couldn't look down. "Are you insane?!"
A soft hum fell from Amoroth, her black gaze roving away from mine, pausing somewhere on skyline behind me. "Are you afraid, Gaspard?"
Yes, I was afraid. I was utterly terrified this monster masquerading as a woman would loosen her fingers from my throat and I would plummet to a painful, violent death below. The vertiginous push of the wind and the slow ebb of blood to my head had me shaking and hyperventilating, unable to draw a clean breath. It was reminiscent of drowning. I felt like I was drowning seven hundred feet in the sky. There was a marked difference between being shocked or scared and being truly terrified, and Amoroth had thrust me so deep into the latter territory I was losing coherency.
"I hope you're afraid," Amoroth said as she touched the side of my face, sliding a fingertip through my frightened tears. Her gaze burned. "For your sake, I really, really do."