The Demon's Gate

The Demon’s Gate

Copyright © 2014 Jeanette Battista

All rights reserved

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Epilogue

Chapter One

I wake to cold water hitting me in the face like a wet slap. I can feel my body jerk, but it is a distant feeling, drowned out by the roaring in my ears. I try to lift my hands to wipe my face, but they will not follow my instructions. They can’t. I blink, confused, feeling foggy and dumb.

I lift my head—or try to—and have to bite down on a cry of pain. My pulse throbs in my temples, sending flashes of ache careening through my skull. Bile rises to the back of my throat. I can feel the acid of it on my tongue.

I need to vomit.

A metal basin is pushed in front of my face by two pale masculine hands. I don’t think about who might be holding it; instead, I retch feebly into the container. The room twirls and dips like a prima ballerina as my vision goes grey. I let my chin drop limply to my chest as I try to think around the incessant throbbing in my head.

The basin is removed from my sight, but water still drips down my face and hair. I experience a flash—a steel glove connecting with the side of my head. That’s why my head hurts so much. Booted feet step into my narrow field of vision. I force my gaze to follow the feet that are in front of me, to follow the legs up to the body and then to the face of the man who hit me.

Raulston. Grand Inquisitor of the British Isles.

My eyes are half-closed in pain, but this is the first chance I’ve had to get a good look at the man who has pursued me over land and sea. He’s tall and lean, reminding me of a bird of prey or a hunting hound. His hair is iron-grey, worn closely-cropped to his head. His nose is large with a prominent bump on the bridge that makes me think it has been broken several times. His cheekbones are like flat, sharp blades, cutting across his face. Everything about him is hard, even the words to describe him.

Except for his eyes. I would have expected cold eyes, perhaps the color of quartz or diamonds with no life in them at all. The color of dead things. But his are a surprisingly warm brown. I stare into them, shocked into a kind of fugue state, unable to reconcile eyes as warm as an otter’s pelt staring out of a face of granite.

His voice is not so soft, and when he speaks it draws me back to the precariousness of my situation. I thought you’d drowned. He takes a step forward and I’m reminded of a bird stooping to capture prey. You’ve escaped me twice. He tilts his head to the side, as if he wants to observe me from every possible angle. The third time was not the charm most say it is.

I say nothing. Words move sluggishly through my head, unable to make their way to my lips. Raulston waits, watching me with those warm eyes that miss nothing.

I take a moment to look around the room. It is small, made of stone, and very damp. There are no windows. The door is off to my left, a heavy metal thing with a small, barred square of glass set in it. The only furniture in the room is the metal chair I’m roped to. An electric lantern sits beside the door—the only light in the room. Raulston must have brought it with him.

Amaranth. His voice snaps me back to attention, my head ringing at the sudden noise. Unusual name.

I continue to stare at him, refusing to speak. He hasn’t actually asked me a question yet, so I feel safe in not answering. I briefly wonder why he’s the one questioning me and not the Grand Inquisitor of Italy. Has there been a coup of some kind within Inquisition ranks? I blink water from my eyes instead of answering, and try to piece together the last moments before his fist collided with my skull.

We’d found what we were looking for in the catacombs of Vatican City: the location of the gate the demons are using as a portal into this world. We also found texts with what could possibly be instructions for closing it, and a spell that could break the link binding me to my demon—spirit, I remind myself—housed inside the body of my best friend. Because of the binding spell, our life forces were linked. If anything happened to me, the demon—Trick—would be exorcised; if anything happened to the spirit, I would die.

Strange weather we had in the square, Raulston continues, not seeming to care that I’m uncommunicative. One would almost expect a magician to have been present.

I stare down at my feet. They are bare. My boots are gone. I liked those boots. I focus on the mundane details like this, hoping that it keeps the terror out of my face. In St. Peter’s Square, Trick had conjured the winds of his element in order to lift the great bell so that Dham could ring it. By doing so, he’d alerted every Inquisitor in the area that we had a spirit working with us. And the only way to have a spirit working with humans was via a magician’s spell.

This is a curious thing, wouldn’t you agree? He paces in front of my chair. There are no more magicians—I wouldn’t have done my job if I’d left any alive. So how could such a thing be possible?

I wince at this. One of those magicians he’s so cavalierly talking about was my father.

Another of those magicians is me.

I can feel the chair I’m in tilt backward, so that I’m at an angle. Rough hands, hands that torture, hands that cause pain, grip my face, forcing me to look at him. I blink at the treatment, but still keep my mouth shut.

We found two bodies in the rubble. One was that of a Ringer, the other an unknown young man.

I can’t look away from Raulston even though I want to desperately. He’s talking about Catriona and Patrick. They’re not just bodies. They were people. They were friends. They died for something they believed in, and for people they loved. To hear him speaking of them so casually, as if they meant nothing, makes me want to shove my fist down his throat so far that I’d need a search party to help me retrieve it.

Cat and Patrick are more than just footnotes on some report detailing casualties and enemy dead. They were my closest friends.

Most witnesses are of the opinion that the young man was the magician in question. I can see why they would jump to such a conclusion—after all, the wind did stop once he was shot.

I can’t hide my flinch. I remember Trick’s sudden stumble when the bullet hit Pat’s body. I can see the surprised look on his face. I hear his recriminations in my head as he berates me for breaking our deal.

I remember setting him free from the bonds imprisoning him in Pat’s body.

I remember Patrick dying in my arms, his dark face going slack. My oldest friend. Dead.

Raulston’s leather-gloved fingers pressing into my flesh remind me where I am. I don’t have time to waste remembering. I can’t allow myself to become distracted. I have one job and that’s to keep my mouth shut about the mission and where we are with it.

However, I don’t believe that to be the case. I think there may have been someone else in your little group capable of casting. He pulls me forward by my face. His tight grip makes my head pound. You wouldn’t have any idea who that might be, would you?

His brown eyes hold my blue ones and there is nothing soft in them, not anymore. They could be marbles for all the feeling in them. I swallow. I would kill for something to drink to ease the aching dryness of my throat.

No, I manage to croak out.

Raulston holds on to my face for a moment more, then steps away. I want to rub my cheeks, but my wrists are bound together behind me and then tied to the chair. I open and close my mouth to try to get some feeling back into my face as I watch him warily.

I remember your mother. He’s not facing me, which is a good thing because I don’t want him to know how much that sentence just hurt me. I don’t want to hear him speak of my mother. She was such a beauty. He shakes his head regretfully. Such a waste. He pauses, then turns around to look at me. You remind me of her.

I glare at him, wishing for the strength to wrench my arms free so I can silence his words with my fists. I wish I still had my blessed blades, but they are with Dham. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to know that he remembers my mother. It would be better if he didn’t, if she were just one more faceless traitor in a long succession of faceless traitors. I don’t want him to think about her at all. It is anathema.

It’s a shame, what she made us do to her. He’s walking back and forth in front of me. God, I wish I could kill him. She could have simply ended it by telling me what I wanted to know.

He stops in front of me. You could do the same.

This time I do speak because if I don’t I’m just as likely to scream and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. No.

His gloved fist smashes into my face. The chair overbalances as all my weight shifts to the side and I slam into the floor. My right shoulder hits stone and pain radiates through my body like a star exploding.

My chair is righted easily; Raulston surprises me with his strength. I work my jaw, making sure it isn’t broken. My teeth bit through the skin on the inside of my cheek and I taste blood. Then Raulston is nose to nose with me and everything I’m feeling is forgotten.

He grabs a fistful of hair at the nape of my neck, holding me still like a mother cat must hold her young. My eyes flicker around the room, trying to take in the details of the surroundings so I won’t have to look at him so close in my space. Raulston shakes me, making the room split into several rooms. My eyes water, further clouding my vision.

I know what your friends carry and if you think that knowing the location of the gate is going to help them, I assure you that you are mistaken.

I manage not to laugh in his face, suddenly realizing he’s hoping I’ll slip up. That I’ll get angry and in my anger tell him something he wants to know. So I say nothing. It’s not something I need to do—convince him that we’re serious about closing the gate to the spirits’ plane. That’s not what he’s interested in anyway.

My thoughts go to Dham. I bought him time to escape. I can only assume it worked since Raulston has kept me alive. Dham’s a Ringer too, and one the Inquisition is very interested in knowing more about. I don’t want to think about what they would do to him if they got their hands on him. It’s enough for me to know he’s free, that he’s got the Key of Solomon and the location of the gate. He can do things I can’t. I can only fight them for so long, but he can reactivate the church bells that drive the demons from their possessed hosts. I have to keep him safe.

Raulston’s grip on my hair tightens, pulling my skin taut. I arch my neck to ease his hold, but that only makes him ratchet down on my hair so that my face is pushed up to his. I can make your time here more painful than you can possibly imagine. Before it’s over, you will tell me everything I want to know about this magician and his magic.

He releases his hold on me, but I keep my head up, glaring into his eyes. My gaze tracks him as he walks over to the door. Think on that, Amaranth. Then he’s through the door and I’m left alone.

Chapter Two

I fell asleep.

I didn’t mean to. Not my best idea with a head injury, but that’s the least of my worries. Hands grab me in the dark, cutting through the ropes and ties binding me and yanking me upright. The blood rushes back into my extremities, the bright flash of pain a torture itself. I’m given no time to adjust or recover; instead, I’m shoved along a dark corridor.

When I stumble too much or can’t keep up, they move me themselves. I don’t know where they’re taking me, but I struggle to move under my own power. I’m not their creature to push and pull as they please. My concussion is making me slow but as I’m shoved through the dark, I try to gather what information I can. Being trained in blind fighting means I’m better than most at moving through the darkness, but here I’m at a loss.

A door opens, spilling light into the black corridor. I’m roughly tossed into another chair, similar to the one I just came from. While I blink to get my eyes used to the sudden brightness, my wrists and forearms are restrained by heavy leather cuffs attached to the arms of the chair. When I pull up there is no give. The chair is bolted to the floor.

Raulston is already there. He’s standing next to a paunchy older man with a double chin and fingers as distended as blood sausages. His coat is black, but there are two slashes on each sleeve, revealing the red cloth beneath. I swallow nervously, my eyes caught by the red peeking out from the black.

He’s a torturer.

I don’t know why I was expecting it to be Raulston who actually performed these abominations on human flesh. Did I think I was special or something? Did I think myself worthy of his time and attention? I’d already caught his notice, which was bad enough. Why did I think he’d waste effort laying hands on me?

But that doesn’t mean he can’t watch. That he can’t ask me questions.

I force my stiff limbs to unclench a bit. I’m still alive, not like Cat and Patrick. I see their faces in my head, memory gilding them with a rich tint of love. Cat’s face is vibrant, limned in light, her expression caught in a laugh. Her bell—the Deid bell she rang to drive demons out of corpses—is in her hands. It is a far cry from the slack face that haunts my nightmares.

Unlike Cat, Patrick’s face is a study in stillness. My memory of him is in soft focus, almost like the edges have been feathered with a paintbrush. He’s not as vibrant as Cat, but he’s still very much alive. His dark eyes snap with joy and his mouth is quirked up in the faintest of smiles. A dark comma of hair falls across his forehead. This is the way I remember him; this is the way he looked in so many of our conversations when we were growing up.

I will never see that face again. The grief that follows my realization is fresh, not dulled at all by however many hours or days it has been since I last saw his body. A bullet, fired by an Inquisition sniper, tore through him, shredding his lungs. He died in my arms.

He died because of me.

They both did.

With Cat, at least, my guilt is somewhat lessened by the fact that she willingly signed up for this mission to Vatican City. As a Ringer, a person who can ring the few remaining bells that can harm demons—spirits, I mean—her skill was needed on this journey. But Patrick…

Patrick never had a choice, not really. He’d been possessed by a spirit, a spirit I needed if I had any hope of success in finding out where the Demon’s Gate was. And I knew that he’d do anything for me if I asked.

So I did.

And he wound up dead because of it.

I’m almost grateful when Raulston’s voice interrupts the spiral that my thoughts have become. One last chance before we begin. The magician. How did he come by the spells of binding?

I stare resolutely ahead. Raulston assumes Patrick is the one behind the spirit’s presence in Vatican City. I’m not going to give him any idea otherwise, no matter what happens to me. Whatever pain they put me through, it’s no more than I deserve for dragging Pat along on my suicide mission.

Raulston goes over to a table. On it is an array of implements and objects. I can see thin metal wands, thumbscrews, several sets of pliers and vises and pincers, and a pear-shaped metal instrument. He picks this one up and walks over to me, holding it in his hand so I can see it.

This is an oldie, but I find that the old ways were usually the best ways. We can only improve on them—gild the lily, so to speak. He raises the piece up to eye level. This one, for instance. Do you know what this is?

He doesn’t wait for me to respond, and I wouldn’t have, even if I had known what he was holding. Raulston’s voice is detached, almost clinical. It’s a Pear of Anguish. Rather poetic name for it, I’ve always thought, especially considering what it does. His eyes glance over to the torturer as if to see if he’s paying attention. You insert the device thusly into a person’s orifice. Any will do, but let’s, for example’s sake, use the mouth. Then you begin to turn this knob here, he points it out to me and then demonstrates.

As he turns it, the Pear begins to open up like a strange metal flower. With each crank, the metal arms spread wider and