"You know, this doesn't look like hell."
"That's because it's not Abaddon. It's the Akasha." Alec strolled beside me as we walked down a long hallway, our footsteps echoing slightly along the smooth walls and stone floor.
"Yeah, but that greeter person told Diamond and me that this was a place of perpetual torment, and that sounds like hell to me. However, this" - I waved a hand around at our surroundings - "this just looks like any old office building. I don't see anything tormentish about it."
"Try opening one of the doors," he said, nodding to one as we passed it.
I paused. "Why? Is something ghoulish going on in there? Are people being dismembered? Tortured? Eaten by fire ants?"
He crossed his arms and nodded toward the nearest door. "Open it and see."
"All right, but if it's something gross, I'm aiming at you when I barf up my breakfast." I opened the door and looked in, braced for the worst.
A group of a half-dozen people sat around a long table, papers scattered across its surface, which was also littered with half-empty bottles of water, and a rainbow of highlighters. Crumpled paper spilled off the table onto the floor, leading in a trail to a whiteboard covered in several different styles of handwriting.
"We are agreed, then, are we not," said a man in a business suit at the head of the table, "that examining the cost savings that will accrue from our cutback on the performance-related functions will make good any and all productivity shortfalls we experience this quarter ? "
A woman shook her head and tapped at the table with one of the highlighters. "I believe that if we realign our organizational aims to better benefit the enterprise, we can absolve our office of the clearly unsustainable redundancy of not only the expense claims, but of the external consultants, which I think we all agree will lead to the downfall of this and other management teams within the venture."
"No, no, no!" a third man said, hoisting his pants up over his beer belly as he rose to his feet. "If we form a task force to investigate the benefits of a mentor program - "
"Good god," I said softly, closing the door. "It's worse than I thought."
Alec nodded. "Middle-management committees. Still think this isn't a bad place?"
I shuddered. "We have to get out of here."
He slid me a look as he took my hand, making me hurry to keep up with his long-legged stride. "I'm glad you're including me in your escape plans, although I regret to inform you that there is no way to get out of the Akasha short of being summoned out."
"Then we'll just have to arrange for that," I said, feeling a bit mulish. I didn't plan on spending the rest of my life dodging committee meetings.
"And just how do you expect to pull that off when we're stuck in here with no way to communicate to the outside? "
"I don't know, but I'm sure as shooting not going to sit around here waiting for people to use me for who knows what bad - Diamond!"
A familiar face turned as I called out her name. She was standing with two other people, but smiled when I almost dragged Alec up to her, her eyes moving from me to him, widening when she took in all his manly glory.
You are making far too much of my appearance, querida.
Oh, don't tell me you don't like it, because I can feel just how much you enjoy overhearing my inadvertently and wholly insincere smutty thoughts about you. I bet you just love it when women go gaga over you, pandering to your insatiable ego, inflating your head until it's approximately the size of Montana . I'm equally sure you love it when women look at you like Diamond is looking at you, which honestly I have to say is way out of line, considering she has a husband she claims she loves, not to mention the fact that she stole him from me.
I thought you no longer wanted him?
I don't, but no woman likes to have a man stolen out from under her nose, and if Diamond thinks she's going to pull that again with you, she's going to be in a whole world of hurt.
Now who's jealous?
I transferred my glare from Diamond to Alec. "I really don't like you," I told him.
"And just when I was beginning to think otherwise of you," he almost purred into my ear.
A shiver of the purest pleasure rippled down my back.
"Cora! You missed a fascinating breakfast. There were some lovely speakers talking about the sorts of things that are available for us to pass the time here in the Akasha. But tell me, who is your friend?" Her gaze flickered from where my fingers were twined through his to his face.
"This is Alec Darwin. He's a vampire. He killed a woman several hundred years ago." I bit back the words that my inner devil was trying to force out, hiding them deep in my psyche so Alec wouldn't overhear them: And he's not available.
"Hello, Alec," Diamond said with a cheery smile.
He responded politely, then peered at her for a few seconds. She's glowing.
She is? I glanced at her, my eyes widening. Oh, no, she is! Was she affected by me becoming the eyeball of Sauron?
Occio di Lucifer, and no, I don't think it works that way. I could feel him turning the facts over in his mind. Did you say that Ulfur glowed, as well?
Yes.
And that he had stolen something from Bael?
Something gold, yes. It looked like a flattened disk when he showed it to me.
Before or after you were cast into the Akasha?
After.
Sins of the saints . . . Ulfur must have stolen all three Tools.
You think he's an Occio, too?
No, it sounds like he's the Anima di Lucifer. That used to be a dragon-shaped aquamanile. Which means that this woman must have been holding the third Tool.
"And you just met? " Diamond interrupted my thoughts with a pointed look at where I still held Alec's hand.
"Yes." I pushed away the spike of jealousy, focusing on what was important. "Diamond, when we were at the house and you were in the basement, what were you doing? "
"Taking pictures. You know that."
"No, I mean right at the moment when suddenly we were zapped here."
"Oh." She looked thoughtful. "I was examining a very pretty goblet I found that had rolled beneath the stairs. It looked valuable, and I was going to bring it up to show you, when poof!"
"Goblet?" I asked Alec.
He nodded. "The Voce di Lucifer. All three of you were holding a Tool when Bael banished Ulfur."
"Bael?" Diamond froze. "The demon lord Bael?"
"Yes." Alec looked at her with speculation that was mirrored in my mind. "Do you know him?"
"Me? Merciful sovereign, no! But I know of him, of course. Everyone does," she explained, her hands fluttering in the air as she spoke. "Are you saying Bael sent us here?"
"That's what we think," I said slowly. "Diamond, how come you know about the demon lord guy? Why didn't you see him at the house? Why aren't you freaking out about being here? And why were you so happy to go off to a breakfast of the damned without so much as wigging out one tiny little bit?"
"What is there to wig out about?" she asked with a bright smile shared between us. "It's the Akasha, not Abaddon, Cora. I've never seen a demon lord before, so I didn't know he was at the house, although it did feel as if there was a very old entrance to Abaddon somewhere on the premises. As for being here, well, I've always wanted to see the Akasha, and here we are! It's so very fascinating, don't you think? And the people here are so nice. Almost desperately pleased to have someone to talk to, if you know what I mean. Margaretta told me there were some informational meetings I could sit in on if I liked to see how things were done here, which sounds super fun, don't you think?"
She's deranged, I told Alec, staring at her in astonishment.
It's tempting to agree, but I don't think she is. I think she's . . . hmm.
She's what?
I'm not quite sure. She appears human, but that could be just a glamour. Whatever she is, I don't believe she's mundane.
Mundane?
Mortal.
I pinched his fingers. Are you saying I'm mundane, buster?
You are mortal, yes, he said with a mental leer. But you're anything but mundane in every other sense of the word.
Warmth washed through me, which I strove to keep him from feeling, but I knew by the smug smile in his mind that he felt it nonetheless.
I seriously needed to get out of here and away from this man before I lost all my wits and ended up like Jas. "I think that this is just about the worst place I've ever been in, Diamond. I've asked Alec to help us get out of here, in fact, and I think maybe you should help us think of a way out."
"Oh, that's no problem," she said, waving away something so minor as permanent occupation in the Akasha. "My great-grandmother is very resourceful. I'm sure she'll figure out something to get us out of here."
Mentally, I shook my head at that comment, but so long as she wasn't worried about being stuck here, I wasn't going to push the point.
"In the meantime," she continued happily, "I intend on enjoying myself. I think I'll sit in on one of those meetings Margaretta told me about. Why don't you and Alec come with me, and we can brainstorm if it will make you feel better?"
"Pass," I told her, smiling to myself at Alec's mental shudder. "We'll just work on getting out of here. I'll give you a yell if we find a way."
"Suit yourself," she said, giving Alec another once-over that had me shifting closer to him, which just made my inner devil giggle. "Then again, perhaps you are doing exactly that. Ta-ta!"
"Don't say it," I told Alec as he was about to make a comment that I knew would make me blush. Don't even think it.
He laughed, and my stomach did a happy little quiver at the sound of it. Dammit, he had a wonderful laugh, warm and deep and filled with genuine amusement. "I won't, but only because I'm doomed to disappoint you by not finding a magic solution to the problem of you being here."
"All of us being here," I said, allowing him to lead me out to a courtyard. It was the same shade of dusty brown as everything else, the building an anachronism of modernity in an otherwise blighted landscape. "You'll have to come with us when we leave."
"I can't. I've been banished here by the Moravian Council. If I was to manage to find a way out, they'd simply send me back."
I eyed him, leaning against yet another sharp, pointy rock. "What exactly did you do to piss off all the other vamps? "
His gaze skittered away as he gently, but firmly, closed his mind. "Seduced my best friend's Beloved, tried to have them both destroyed, and betrayed Dark Ones to those who would see us exterminated."
His face was a mask of indifference, but his eyes, oh, those lovely eyes, they revealed the emotions he kept from me. Pain was in them, both self-loathing and pain caused by others. His words confirmed what I believed about vampires - that their characters were reprehensible and unworthy of my concern - but just as I knew that not every vampire was created equal, so I knew that Alec wasn't truly any of those things.
"When you killed that woman, what were you thinking?" I couldn't stop myself from asking.
It took him a minute to respond. I had the feeling he was far away in his thoughts. "The one who killed my Beloved? "
I nodded.
His eyes closed for a few seconds as he struggled with the gut-searing agony that memory brought him. "I didn't think. I saw the corpse burned and mangled, and knew the reaper had deliberately killed her. I struck out of instinct. It wasn't until recently that I found out it had been an accident all along, and that the reaper hadn't specifically targeted my Beloved." He gave a short, bitter laugh. "All those centuries I spent convinced revenge would lessen the pain, all that wasted time . . ."
"I don't believe you," I told him, my emotions tangled up with one another, but his honor, at least, was something I didn't doubt.
His expression hardened. "That doesn't surprise me. No one else believes me; why should you?"
"I meant" - I slid my hand under his jacket, spreading my fingers out over where his heart beat true and strong - "I don't believe what you said about betraying your own people. You didn't."
His gaze searched my face for signs I was mocking him. I let him feel the strength of my conviction. "No, I didn't, but that didn't stop them from condemning me for acts I didn't commit."
"Why didn't you defend yourself?"
His lips twisted in a self-mocking smile. "Because I did betray my friend."
"And seduced his Beloved?"
He rubbed his thumb along my bottom lip, his eyes on my mouth. "That was before I knew she was his Beloved, actually. Once she made it clear her choice was him, not me, I left her alone. Other than trying to have them killed, but even that plan had lost its charm."
"So you're martyring yourself because you were a bad friend?"
His gaze flitted away again, his hand dropping. "It's a bit more complicated than that, but ultimately, I was responsible for trying to ruin Kris's life, and it's only right I should pay for that."
"Bullshit," I told him, causing his eyes to widen. "You're having a good old-fashioned wallow in self-pity is all. I don't say that you don't have it coming to you, because I think you've done some things that you shouldn't have done, but it seems to me that you've paid more than the price of your penance, and it's time to move on. And that's just what I intend to happen. We're going to get out of here, all three of us, and no, I'm not going to leave you behind - "
The words were ripped from my mouth as if a giant hand had snatched me aside, and flung me down somewhere else entirely.
Which is basically what happened. I was aware of a momentary dropping sensation, and landed on my hands and knees on a wooden floor. I stared for a moment down at the grain of the wood, my brain stunned into a complete lack of cognizant thought, before I looked up to see a man and a woman standing before me.
We were in a room that looked like a library of some sort, all deep leather armchairs, and pretty bound books in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. I glanced at the people watching me.
The man was of middle height, with black hair and a goatee. The woman, who edged away from him, had a sunny face, curly red hair, and a friendly demeanor that made me address her rather than her companion. "What on earth just happened?"
"I summoned you," the woman said. She had an English accent, and a nice smile as she gestured toward the man, who stood with his arms crossed, his eyes narrowed on me. "You have Mr. de Marco to thank for that, though, since he hired me. I'm a Guardian, you see. My name is Noelle. Do you know that you're glowing ?"
"So I've been told. Why . . . wait, de Marco? You're - " A shadow moved behind the man, coming forward and resolving itself. "Ulfur!"
"I am Alphonse de Marco, and you will give to me the Occio di Lucifer," Ulfur's boss said in a no-nonsense tone of voice that really just irritated me more than frightened me.
"The . . . oh. That." I wondered how he'd feel if he knew the Tool was broken, and that I was the designated hitter. I glanced at Ulfur, but his expression gave nothing away.
Ulfur hadn't told his boss what happened, I realized with a secret smile. Bless his heart, he used the fact that I had the Occio to convince his boss to pull me out of the Akasha.
Leaving Alec and Diamond behind.
"Do you have it? " de Marco asked, his expression darkening into anger.
"Yes." Hastily I assembled a plan that I hoped would rescue both Alec and Diamond. "I do."
"I have summoned you out of the Akasha. In gratitude, you will give it to me," he ordered, his bossy tone really starting to get under my skin.
I looked at the imperative hand he held out before me. "Well, you know, the Occio is a really big deal. It's one-third of the Tools of Dale."
"Bael," Noelle the Guardian corrected.
"Bael, sorry." De Marco's eyes narrowed on me suspiciously. I cleared my throat and said with what I hoped was convincing insouciance, "I call him Dale. It's a little thing we do."
Ulfur rubbed his hand over his eyes, but said nothing.
"But that's neither here nor there, and what is here is . . . well, actually, he's there, not here. If you know what I mean. Do you know what I mean?"
"No," de Marco growled.
"Oh. Well, it's Alec."
"Alec? Who is Alec?" De Marco was clearly getting angrier with each passing second.
Ulfur's eyes widened as he glanced between his boss and me. I had the feeling he was trying to tell me something, but I didn't know what it was.
"He's a friend," I said carefully, trying to suss what had Ulfur so agitated.
"I don't care about your friends. I just want the Occio, and I want it now. Hand over the payment for your removal from the Akasha, or I will have you returned there immediately."
"Hang on there, buster," I said, deciding that the best way to deal with people like him was to bluff my way through his demands. "I will make a deal with you - you spring my two friends from the Akasha, and I'll give you the Occio."
Ulfur's eyes just about bugged out of his head.
"You dare - " De Marco sucked in a huge amount of air just like he was inflatable or something. "You dare to defy me? Do you know who I am, mortal?"
"Yeah, you're Ulfur's boss, the guy who told him to steal the Tools from the frickin' king of hell!"
"Prince, not king," Noelle said, then looked away quickly, pretending interest in a picture on the wall.
"Dale likes me to call him king in our private moments," I lied, trying to look like someone who dated Satan. "So here's the thing, de Marco: You want Dale's Occio, you can have it . . . just as soon as you get Alec and Diamond out of the Akasha."
"I am not an Akashic removal service!" de Marco snarled, his black eyebrows pulled down to form a unibrow. I was tempted to tell him it wasn't a good look for him, but felt he wouldn't be receptive to such criticism. "You owe me, mortal, not the other way around. You will hand over the Occio now."
"Or what?" I said, buffing a fingernail on my jeans.
"Or I'll make you sorry you ever drew breath," he snarled.
"Hello? Who has the eyeball of Dale? That's right, I do, and that means you can't hurt me." I fervently prayed that was true.
Ulfur weaved a little, like he might pass out. Noelle looked startled.
Maybe it wasn't true.
De Marco seemed to swell again, then let out a scream of sheer frustration. "One."
"Huh?" I stopped edging toward Noelle, who was in turn sliding covertly away from de Marco.
"One." His nostrils flared. "I will have the Guardian summon one more person, but that is it."
"But . . . I have two friends there."
"Then you will choose between them. Now!"
I swallowed back a little zing of fear at the look in his eyes. He didn't strike me as being too mentally stable. "Um . . ." I thought frantically. Diamond, I should tell him to get Diamond out. She was my friend . . . of a sort . . . and she didn't do anything to deserve being banished to the Akasha. I would get Diamond out.
Leaving Alec behind.
Alone.
With no one to feed him.
And worse, he would know I hadn't cared enough about him to rescue him, too.
But he was a murdering vampire and, by his own admission, had betrayed his friend. He had accepted the punishment meted out to him. He was resigned to being in the Akasha.
"All right," I said, sending a little prayer that Alec would understand why I had no choice but to pick Diamond. "I've decided."
"Give the name to the Guardian, and let us be through with this!" de Marco snapped.
"Noelle, would you please summon . . . ?" I looked at her. She looked at me, waiting. I thought of Diamond. My inner devil wept and called me all sorts of names.
No one had ever tended Alec's wounds.
"Summon Alec Darwin, please," I heard someone say, and to my astonishment - and inner devil's joy - it was my mouth that spoke the words.
