Page 17 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

A trail of black feathers, each the size of a sparrow’s wing and slick as an oil slick, led me deeper into the rat warren of Hell’s Corporate Complex.

Each time I picked a new corridor, there was the next feather, drifting out from a doorway or caught in a fracture on the wall.

Sometimes they hovered in the air just long enough for me to catch sight, then vanished as soon as I rounded the corner.

Sometimes I had to stoop to retrieve one from a puddle of black slime, and each time I did, the slime stung the skin on my fingers and burned.

We’d split up three hours ago, or three Hell hours ago, which ran by a different clock than anything I’d ever seen in the upper worlds.

Aziz had gone left, straight toward the main armory, the place he always felt at home.

Levi had gone vertical, scaling the office blocks and the comms towers like he expected to find a swimming pool and a cabana at the top.

I’d gone straight, and then down, and then, when the floors began to shudder and the walls started bleeding ink, down again.

Nobody in their right mind would follow this trail, and that was how I knew it was meant for me.

I ran a claw along the wall, breaking the crust of runes Lucifer’s architects had slathered on every surface.

Here and there, the runes had been eaten away, replaced by cracks that oozed inky black.

The Void’s signature. I snorted, ignoring the way my lungs pulled in more poison than oxygen.

I’d always been good at compartmentalizing.

In my old job, I’d spent centuries learning how to filter out Hell’s ambient evil and focus on the task.

Now, with Lilith’s life on the line and the palace in a slow collapse, I should have been able to handle a simple infestation.

But the feathers kept coming. They got bigger as I went, and the spaces around them got smaller.

Soon I had to stoop, then crawl, then dig my way under collapsed beams and torn wire.

My demon form made it easier. I didn’t bleed if I cut myself, I didn’t bruise, I didn’t even leave much of a scent, which was good because Lucifer’s new guards were everywhere, and they tracked mostly by smell.

Still, even in this body, I could tell I was being herded.

At the end, the last feather waited in front of a door made of blackened bone.

The bones weren’t just assembled for effect.

They still had bits of meat and hair stuck to them, and the whole thing vibrated with a low, wet hum.

I pressed my palm to the bone door. It opened at my touch, no resistance, just a sigh of air and the flutter of a hundred more feathers that drifted around me as I stepped inside.

The shrine was a cylinder, walls made of mirrors that stretched to a point above my head, as if the room was a telescope aimed straight up the devil’s asshole and into infinity.

The mirrors were old, warped and pitted, some with the silvering peeled back to show the brick beneath.

Every surface reflected a thousand versions of me: hunched, blue-skinned, eyes like searchlights, forehead ridged and throbbing.

There was no floor, not really. Just a surface of more mirrors, cracked and black, that reflected my feet as a cluster of shattered claws.

The air was perfectly still, but the feathers continued to fall, landing on the floor and then melting.

At the center of the room sat a dais. More bone, but this time the bones were arranged in a spiral staircase that led nowhere, just stopped after three turns.

On the bottom step, a pile of black feathers heaped around a candelabrum of finger bones.

The candles were unlit, but they oozed wax that steamed as it pooled, burning the feathers to cinders.

I waited. My demon heart pounded out a martial rhythm, the kind I’d used to calm myself before every battle since the Fall. Nothing moved. My own face, repeated to infinity, stared back at me with a look I hadn’t seen since I was alive: actual fear.

“Is this it?” I asked the mirrors. “Is this what passes for a trap these days?”

No answer. Only the shifting, almost inaudible tick of the mirrors stretching and relaxing, like the room was breathing me in.

I stepped forward. The mirrors on the wall elongated my body, made me look more like a mantis than a man, all elbows and knees and twitching antennae.

As I walked, each step rang with a different sound of glass, bone, water, fire.

Nothing about the place was stable, but I pressed on.

I was used to shrines, to oracles and prediction rituals, but this was more than just a freakshow.

The further I walked, the more I got the sense that the room was remembering me.

When I reached the dais, the feathers at its base parted, revealing the skull of something that was probably once human.

The jaw moved, as if working up the courage to speak, but then a cold wind swept down from the mirrors and snuffed out the motion.

The wind carried a single word, not in any language I knew, but in the old tongue.

The word was a question, and it meant: “Why are you still here?”

I answered in the same language. “Because you called me.”

The room shivered. The mirrors nearest me went black, then rippled as if something large had passed behind them. In the blackness, a pair of eyes appeared.

“Show yourself,” I said.

The air thickened. Then, from between two mirrors, she stepped out. The Seer.

She had no body, not a proper one. She was all cloak and shadow, her face a mask of feathers and her mouth invisible except for the glint of pointed teeth when she turned her head.

Her eyes reflected nothing, even in the world’s most overstocked hall of mirrors.

She moved with no sound, gliding around the dais in a counterclockwise orbit, one finger trailing along the surface of the bone as if reading Braille.

“Nice place you have here,” I said, not expecting an answer.

The Seer stopped, tilted her head, and then, by some trick of the mirrors, or maybe just by will, she was behind me, breathing down the back of my neck.

I shivered, for real this time.

“You seek her,” the Seer said. The words came not from her mask but from all around, layered and doubled, as if the entire shrine was her vocal cord. “You seek your lost queen.”

I grunted. “You know where she is?”

“Of course.” The Seer began to walk again, drifting between reflections, always staying just at the edge of my peripheral. “But you do not know what she has become. You think to rescue her. You think to claim her for yourself. But she is not yours. Not anymore.”

I felt my lips peel back, a snarl starting at the base of my throat. “Where is she?”

The Seer drifted up the spiral, feet not quite touching the bone. Her hands were tipped in claws, but instead of black, they were luminous, glowing like they’d been carved from glowworms. She reached the top step, then turned to face me. “You do not deserve her,” she said. “You never did.”

I started up the stairs, ignoring the pain as the bone bent under my weight. “Don’t waste my time with prophecy. You want to be useful? Tell me where she is, and I’ll owe you a favor.”

She laughed. The sound made my teeth itch. “You have nothing to bargain with. Your brothers are lost. You are alone. The master of this house will kill you as soon as you leave this chamber.”

I kept climbing, two steps at a time. “I don’t die easy.”

At the top step, I reached for her. My hand went through her, as if she was made of cold smoke and fog, but the sensation stung me anyway, needles of cold burrowing in through my skin and setting the nerves alight. I yanked my arm back, shaking it, but the Seer only smiled wider.

She pointed down at the floor, at the cracked mirror that reflected me in a hundred broken shards. “Look.”

I looked.

The mirrors rippled, the cracks mending for a split second to show a single, perfect image. Not of me, but of Lilith.

She sat on a black throne, her body stretched in regal languor, eyes aglow with a pale blue fire.

Lucifer sprawled at her feet, not dead but beaten, her foot on his chest. His face, usually so perfect and composed, was a ruined.

His mouth torn, horns snapped, the wounds leaking gold and silver in thick, viscous streams. Lilith smiled down at him, and the smile was not gentle.

The Seer’s voice echoed through the room: “This is what comes next.”

The image zoomed, and I saw myself and Aziz and Levi kneeling before her, heads bowed, all three of us naked and battered.

Aziz’s body was covered in wounds, Levi’s mouth was torn at one corner, and my own hands were shackled in front of me, wrists scored with black lines where the Void had tried to claim me.

The next moment, Lilith spread her legs wide on the throne, the skin between her thighs glowing with a black, hungry light.

One by one, we rose from our knees, and each of us in turn crawled to her and pressed our mouths to the void between her legs.

The room pulsed with the rhythm of it. Three sets of lips, three tongues, three bodies desperate to please her, to worship her, to claim even a drop of her favor.

As we licked and sucked and worshipped, the Void poured from her, tendrils of darkness winding around us and burrowing into our backs, marking us as hers, not Lucifer’s.

Each time one of us made her shudder, a new line of black branded itself on our bodies, curling up the thighs, across the back, along the ridges of the skull.

It hurt, but the pain was blissful, an addiction that demanded more and more.

Lucifer watched from the floor, mouth open, but powerless. He raged, he spat, but nothing could stop the tide. Every orgasm was a sacrament, every scream a prayer.

I tried to look away, but the mirrors locked my gaze.

I watched as I drove my tongue deeper into Lilith, lapping up the black honey that oozed from her cunt, feeling it burn down my throat and then explode in my gut.

The taste was sweet and bitter, like blood and candy and gunmetal.

I came, over and over, my cock spraying black seed across the mirrors, each spurt carving a new rune in the glass.

When it was over, we collapsed in a heap at her feet. She stroked our heads, purring, and the Seer’s voice boomed out one last phrase: “You will follow her. Or die trying.”

The mirrors shattered, the image gone. I was back in the shrine, on my knees, gasping for air. My cock throbbed, hard as steel, and a dribble of black pre-cum pooled on the floor.

The Seer descended the stairs, her feet making no sound. She stopped in front of me, bent down, and placed her hands on my head. Her fingers were ice, and the cold jolted me out of my trance.

“Remember,” she said. “Remember the path. Do not forget.”

A surge of images slammed into me—hallways, gates, guard rotations, passwords, the exact location of Lilith’s new palace within the palace.

The knowledge burned through my head, so fast I thought my brain might boil.

I screamed, but no sound came out. I staggered back, clutching my skull, while the Seer watched with a smile so wide it nearly split her face in half.

When the pain faded, the memories were fixed.

The Seer had walked it; I stole the steps. North Tower . Take the servants’ spine. Bone key for each of us; seam-ash to throat and wrists. Mouths closed on the count. Sixty-six beats to cross the skin—after that, the ward closes.

Every turn, every stair, every hidden passage between here and Lilith’s cell was etched in my mind.

I glared up at the Seer. “Why?”

She cocked her head, and for a second I thought she’d laugh again, but she only bared her teeth. “My reasons are not yours,” she said. “But you will not walk alone. I will distract the master. The rest is yours.”

She turned, drifted to the bone door, and began to dissolve, her body unraveling into a swarm of black feathers that swirled around the room, then vanished one by one into the cracks between the mirrors.

I lunged after her, but she was already gone. Only a single feather remained, spinning down through the air. I caught it, tucked it into my jacket, and stood.

The shrine was silent now, the mirrors back to their original, fractured state. My reflection stared at me from every angle, jaw clenched, veins bulging with the new information. I wiped the pre-cum from my cock, zipped up, and headed for the door.

The palace was still collapsing, the Void eating away at the foundations. But I knew where I was going now.

I knew how to find her.

I sprinted through the corridors, the path unfolding before me like a predestined riot, every twist and dead end already burned into my mind.

The palace roared around me, but all I heard was her breath, her desire, her need.

I pushed faster, driven by the promise of reunion and the certainty of what came next.

The others would catch up, or they wouldn’t.

Either way, Lilith was waiting.

And I was coming for her.