Page 98 of Hell-Bound

Her voice suddenly turned harsh. She closed her black eyes, squinting them tightly as though trying to ward away a bad memory.

Ren looked down. “I didn’t realize—”

“No. You didn’t. But…it’s fine. I understand that it’s easy to forget, seeing all the sleepers, that some of us willingly signed contracts and accepted the consequences. Others are more…naive.”

“Maybe that was me,” Ren whispered.

The Devil made a noncommittal sound. “Maybe…but I don’t think so.”

Ren nodded. “I…I’m ready to go.”

Zelaia’s expression continued to be sympathetic, but she said no more. She glided to the center of the washroom and flicked her wrist. Nothing happened.

“That’s not a good sign.” She said, examining her palms.

“What?”

Ren jerked her head towards Zelaia, bracing for more bad news.

“My magic is weaker. It still works, but…it’s stifled.” She paused. “Luckily for you, I’mverytalented. Even without Azur,” she said before another flick, opening a portal.

They emerged in Ogriazeth, still shadowed by nightfall. But even with the glow of the street lanterns, Ren didn't recognize the neighborhood.

Zelaia signaled for her to follow and the two females walked, pace slow, eventually running into a small stream,muddied with ash, that crisscrossed the middle of the city. Ren did not try to engage with Zelaia, she was too numb, and her brain didn’t have enough energy for small talk. For her part, Zelaia didn’t seem to be a fan of empty words.

The stream began to wind down, feeding into a large grey river that entered a new area of the Forest of Nahmir. Zelaia ducked under several ashen trees and rounded a corner to the river bank. There, mere feet away from the ripples of the water, was a small patch of luscious green grass, almost neon in the night light, next to all the ash and gray. It was the first appearance of live vegetation that Ren had seen since being in the hells. Sitting, legs crossed in the middle of the patch, was an emaciated red Devil with stringy black hair.

It took a second for Ren’s sluggish brain to compute, but when it did, she bolted and threw her arms around the Devil’s neck.

“Jester!”

Fat tears began to soak Jester’s ragged shirt. He was so excruciatingly thin that Ren could wrap her arms around him fully.

Jester didn’t respond or react.

She pulled back and looked at his face.

His eyes were open, but there was no life inside—Jester was a sleeper.

She couldn’t breathe.

She sank down on the small piece of grass and stared at her friend. The feelings were too confusing and too knotted to disentangle. Her grief for her friend was insurmountable, but this wasn’t the Jester she knew.

“What happened to him?” she asked Zelaia, unable to see through her tears.

Zelaia joined her on the ground.

“I don’t know for sure. It happened before I was with Azur, and he won’t talk about it. I know that Jester was one of Azur’s first souls, and somewhere along the way, he broke his contract and became Azur’s first sleeper. I think Jester’s realname was Ahdan.”

Ren’s ears started to ring.

“Ahdan? Jester—Azur—told me about an Ahdan. He sold his soul to save his mother from a disease.”

Zelaia pinched her brows together in confusion.

“Devils don’t typically share the contents of their contracts—usually we can’t, but I remember my parents telling me that there’d been a blight on the Lesser Devils for several years. The stories of that time were terrible. I even had an uncle who succumbed. Then, one day, it just disappeared.”

“He violated his contract. On purpose,” Ren whispered. “Azur told me that something bad had happened to Ahdan. I had assumed he meant that he’d killed himself.”