Читать книгу Renegade Angel - Kendra Leigh Castle - Страница 8

He left at twilight, moving swift and silent beneath a deepening blood-red sky. Beyond the gleaming walls of the Infernal City, across the cracked and barren wasteland that rang day and night with the cries of the damned, the crow soared on sooty wings toward the gnarled shapes jutting into the acrid air just beyond.

The Gate of Souls. Freedom.

That was, if they managed to make it out.

Raum coasted on the hot currents of a smoke-filled breeze, trying to concentrate on the final barrier of the mountains as he was borne ever closer to his destination. Beneath him, small fires dotted the barren desert landscape. A quick glance, and Raum could see the lurching figures of the legions of lesser demons, the nefari, who had served his kind in battle since the original Fall.

Disgusting creatures, Raum thought, jerking his gaze away from the hunched and muscular beings, red-skinned with curved horns sprouting from their foreheads, gamboling around the flames. As an earl of Hell, he had twenty legions of his own to command. But even after thousands of years in the Infernal City, Raum had never really developed much of an appreciation for the ill-tempered, dimwitted foot soldiers of the damned.

If he looked hard enough, Raum knew he’d be able to make out other, smaller figures writhing in torment on the ground around the demons plying their trade out here in the wastes. Of course, that might have indicated he had an interest in the bunch of primates, thrown together with a handful of clay and some divine spit, who kept Hell in business.

And he was going to be in close contact with those useless creatures soon enough.

If only there were another way. But there wasn’t. Raum flapped his wings once, twice, picking up speed, anxious to have the final betrayal done with. When you were a fallen angel who had been marked for death by the Infernal Council, your options became very limited. He had already walked away from Heaven, anxious to help create a paradise that had nothing to do with serving the hated humans. Even after all this time, he couldn’t understand what about humanity, so inferior in every way, had merited the reward of an eternal soul. It had been the final straw, a slight he could not ignore.

But in walking away from Heaven, he’d had another option. This time, Raum still wasn’t clear on what, or where, he was running to. Only that, if he wanted to sur vive, he must help save the humans from the rapidly encroaching darkness: a darkness he had helped create, and which now threatened to swallow him whole unless he did the unthinkable.

Curse you, Mammon, he thought. Not that such thoughts had ever done him any good.

The betrayal shouldn’t have surprised him. Mammon wasn’t the Prince of Avarice for nothing. Eternally jealous, eternally greedy, Mammon had long been tired of always being in Raum’s shadow. Raum had simply found the other demon’s constant efforts to outdo him amusing, or mildly irritating, when he’d even bothered to notice. After all, his own prowess at theft, deception and destruction had made him a legend. Mammon’s singular talent for sucking up had gotten the demon lord a seat on the ruling Infernal Council and ready access to Lucifer’s ear.

To each his own, Raum had always thought, and paid little attention. Until recently, that was, when some of his brethren, tired of Mammon’s utter uselessness and lack of leadership, had begun encouraging Raum to make a challenge. And he, Raum thought darkly, fool that he was, had begun to consider emerging from centuries of relative seclusion to do it. Then the serpent king had arrived on his doorstep just a few nights past, bearing the news that he, Raum, would soon be charged and executed as a traitor, accused of willfully undermining Hell’s cause by his obvious and egregious lack of sup port.

He would have been destroyed for nothing more than his own indifference to the games of the Council and life at Court, his own solitary nature all the evidence Lucifer needed to finally succumb to the venom Mammon had spewed for years. Raum had to give Mammon some small amount of credit: though he himself had never spoken publicly of his intention to challenge for Mammon’s position on the Council, his old rival knew a threat to his position when he saw it.

So now here he was, forced to choose between the eternal darkness of a demon’s death, or living by doing things he would once have considered even worse than such a death.

The irony wasn’t lost on him.

The sky began to darken as he approached the far edge of the underworld, and Raum’s heartbeat accelerated no matter how hard he tried to force calm. Condemned or no, the finality of his decision had only just begun to penetrate.

He could sense Leviathan as he drew near the mountains, and the gate beyond. Leviathan, and the five others who would be accompanying them, now traitors below just as they had been above. Raum didn’t know all of their stories, nor did he care. All that mattered was that they were united in their refusal to die quietly. He could feel his brothers’ power drifting upward like hot sparks carried on a desert breeze, surrounding an unmistakable shard of deathly cold that cut like a knife through the heat.

Leviathan. Only a fool would have felt safe under the gaze of those unusual, oceanic eyes. Raum was no fool. He wondered if he would ever understand what had driven the serpent king to this, leading a ragtag collection of marked nobles out of Hell and into the employ of the white-winged control freaks they’d all spent so long either fighting, infuriating or avoiding. What did Leviathan care if the balance between good and evil on Earth was tipping into darkness? And even more confounding to Raum was the question of how Lucifer’s prized pet had known that the highest ranks of angels, the seraphim, would be desperate enough to want the help of a bunch of Hellish exiles in righting the Balance.

Of course, if he hadn’t been so desperate himself, he wouldn’t have touched this with a ten-foot pole, and he was in no position to be asking questions. The pay was good. The prospect of continuing to exist was even better. And dirty work was, after all, his specialty, no matter who he was doing it for. He was Raum, Destroyer of Dignities and Robber of Kings.

At least, he had been. Now, he was no longer sure what he was. But with luck, he would have more time to figure it out.

The mountains rising ahead were stunted, blackened things, the grotesque monotony of the ring they created around the kingdom broken only by the places where the five rivers sliced through on their way to the endless Stygian sea. Raum soared higher, clearing the peaks with rapid, graceful movements, and then dipped to descend into the roiling black mists that eternally blanketed the Borderlands, and the Gate of Souls.

Anticipation rushed through Raum’s blood. He was about to have a purpose again. And for the first time, it appeared that his former brethren needed him. It was incredibly satisfying … perplexing, weird and almost deviant, but satisfying.

The Infernal Council was right about one thing: he’d never given a damn for them. They’d now given him the perfect excuse to be an eternal thorn in their sides. Raum looked forward to it … and to the day when he could confront the Prince of Avarice on his own terms, when there would be no one for the insidious coward to hide behind. If that day came, that was. If he saw tomorrow.

But no matter what, it was time to find out. Raum took a deep breath of the sulfur-tinged air, and dived into the eternal night surrounding the gates of Hell.