Page 69

Anchored to the floor by spilt wax, the flicker of a single candle offered the damp crypt’s solitary illumination.

Pressed against the opposite wall, another sorry soul shared Pearl’s gloom—a man, cowering and crying, whom Malcolm had shoved into the cell shortly before he’d locked her away. Together, they both had listened to the splat and bang of brick piled up on the other side of the room’s only exit.

Their eyes had met over that candle, both aware this was their end.

A moldering cot under her, Pearl rocked, arms tight around her knees, as if the pain of her cheek and gums might be soothed by such movement.

Nothing helped.

She was in agony.

“Please... don’t hurt me.” Like a cornered animal, the man—and unlike the other things she’d seen upstairs, he was a man—stared at her with wide, bloodshot eyes.

He was petrified.

Pearl could hear his heart, the thrum of his blood loud, but she paid him no mind, too wrapped up in her own misery to care.

The panicked stranger watched, bracing, as if she were going to leap up to devour him. “It wasn’t my fault... I told them it wasn’t my fault. I don’t want to die.”

Head throbbing, she snapped, words lisped by slack, swollen lips, “No one wants to die. It doesn’t change the fact that everyone does.”

He sputtered out a list of excuses as if she might exonerate him of whatever crime landed him in the same room as her. “The boy. Yes, I took him... but I didn’t mean to kill him. I don’t belong here, dame. You gotta believe me. I do not deserve this.”

Pearl wanted silence. “The thing upstairs would disagree.”

The fretting human was so much larger than her, but he cowered as if a slurring, toothless girl was the greatest threat in existence. “Please don’t eat me. I want to go home...”

“Eat you?” She scoffed. The taste of men was foul and this one smelled especially vile. “I am not going to eat you. Find your way out. Go home for all I care.”

He took her word to heart, and like a fool, tried to pry open the door. “It won’t budge.”

Nor would it.

It was bricked shut.

Unless he was set free in a few days, the male would die from lack of water and food. Then she would have his corpse for company and the sweet smelling rot that putrefied the dead. And it would grow quiet—fitting that they’d shoved her into an old tomb.

Pearl had to admit, the candle was an interesting touch... one last moment of light soon to snuff out. The stone walls held no windows, only the notched shelves of a coffin-less crypt, the cot, and the dirt.

When she’d first been dragged into this horrible place, before her interview with the devil, the stone structure looked like a church. Now she was certain it had been before being desecrated. It was the feel to the place: ungodliness, desperation. Bad things had happened in these halls over various, sundry years. How many other old tombs held prisoners bricked away to rot? How many of them had one final candle?

Pearl had considered burning her clothing to extend the light, but it seemed pointless. Dark would intercede soon enough, and she’d rather be warm... as warm as one can be in a freezing box... than hold onto false hope.

Knees under her chin, she watched the flame spark on the last fragment of wick, until it was only an ember. The tang of smoke in the air, the space grew stygian. Eyes open or closed, it made no difference. There was nothing to see.

But there was something to fear.

Now that all the light had been snuffed out, she could feel it watching from the dark.

Before having her cast down into this pit, it had looked at her, the feel of its cold hands had caressed her face. She could see the glowing red eyes, the devil peering at her from the lightless abyss. And then he was there, growing from the shadows, seeping up from the floor as if pulling darkness into the form of his desire.

Screwing her eyes shut, Pearl buried her face against her knees.

Standing over her, towering and projecting agitation, the demon hissed, “You were ordered to be fed. Why is this human still living?”

The human started screaming.

Pearl shrieked herself when a cold touch landed on her stinging scalp. “I can’t!”