“Moloch,” Baal snarled.“What is this?”
“It’s a speech,” Moloch teased.“The demons are tired, Baal.”He lifted a clawed finger, jabbed it in Baal’s direction.“They are tired ofyou.Where is Satan?Hell suffers without him.Hell needs him.Tell us where you’ve hidden him.”
“Satan has matters beyond attending to his spoiled children!”Baal spat.“Step down.Step down or suffer in a prison cell.”
“You can’t imprison us all, regent.”Moloch waved an arm and other demons in the crowd hollered, raising their fists, calling the name of Moloch, demanding to know where Satan was.“You — Asmodeus.”The demon of lust in question stared forward, as if he hadn’t even heard the insurgent’s call.“Come on, you most of all know that Hell has become unlivable under the rule of Baal.That’s why you keep running away, isn’t it?You know this place has rotten.”
As this occurred, Gemory brought her face to Dante’s ear and, voice quiet, told him: “That demon you see is Moloch.He was a duke once but Satan had his title taken away because he was so violent.”Dante blinked in surprise, trying to imagine how any demon could be too violent for the devil.“He’s been trying to build an army for the last hundred years to overthrow Baal.”Gemory’s eyes lingered not on Moloch but on Ara, the supporter standing closest to him, with a pitiful gleam.“He… wants to be at Satan’s side, but he’s cruel.He’s crueler than anything.”
“You’re almost there, Moloch,” Asmodeus answered, then tilted his head at him and laughed.“If I swear to you, you’ll have the favor of the majority of dukes, right?”At that, Moloch twitched, and some of his own followers snickered at their hero’s goals being stripped bare so inelegantly before everyone.“Well, what would I get out of it?”
“Not a whipping,” Moloch joked back.“And an angel for yourself.You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”He nodded his head, suddenly, at Armoni, then muttered more darkly: “You keep stealing my slave away, after all.How about we all go after that angel you set free, and you can have your own slave, so that you can keep your hands off of mine?”
When Moloch looked at Armoni, the angel’s eyes widened in terror, and then he lowered his face quickly, and though Dante hadn’t understood, he tried to gesture subtly.He pointed at Armoni, and then he waved a hand at Moloch, before making a slicing motion at his neck.He was trying to tell Armoni to kill him, but the angel shook his head gravely.
Ignoring them, Moloch turned up to Baal again and said, “Tell us where Satan is, and maybe there will be no new war in Hell.”
The duke, again, said, “Step down.”
“No,” replied Moloch, grinning, baiting him.And he soon retrieved a stone from his robes, and he flung it across the stadium.He didn’t hit Baal — in fact, he missed extraordinarily well— but the second the rock left his fingers, others in the crowd cheered and stood.Many laughed, many threw stones — those joining Moloch's army — and others threw objects just to throw them.
Baal growled, and then shouted, “Take the prisoners back to their cell,” before he flew up into the air again, rose high over the crowd, then slowly, almost impossibly so, lunged toward Moloch.But whatever fight was about to occur — Dante wouldn’t be able to see it.He felt himself grabbed by a guard, thrown off the platform to clumsily fall onto the ground with a hiss of pain and a twist of his ankle.At the same time that he was shoved forward to walk alongside Asmodeus and Armoni, however, the guards also frantically pushed back the demons scaling down from their seats onto the arena.Dante hurried alongside the two other prisoners, with only two guards dragging them along now, toward the archways.Chaos was erupting loud, bloody — yelling, shoving, brawls, stones flying.Far above, animals looming at the edges of the ceiling cackled and howled.
“We have to get away from these damn guards,” Asmodeus whispered in Dante’s language, and then he threw himself against one of them, making him stagger into the crowd.Then, Asmodeus took Armoni by the arm and tried to sink into the sea of demons opposite the guard he’d just shoved, and Dante understood.He hurried after Asmodeus, Armoni, and soon, the three of them were pushing through everyone, running.Briefly, Dante looked back only to see Rosier and Gemory trying to follow, however thick the crowd between them grew.
Armoni spoke, quickly, urgently.A quick string of words, something about an ‘Azazel.’
And before Dante could ask for translation, Asmodeus said: “We’re headed for the Watchers.”
CHAPTER23
The anti-Christ, Tadeo, stared.Cold, a breeze sweeping by fluttered the rim of his hat, and the wind whistled in his ears.There were other sounds, of course there were — distant music from some yard, some faraway talking, the sound of cars on another road, a few barks, some bird calls — but though nothing had gone still, Tadeo couldn’t find it in himself to realize that the world was still moving, breathing.How could the Earth continue to beat its heart if Tadeo was staring into the face of the devil?He was beautiful.Oh, he was beautiful — the shine of his eyes, the wisps of his hair, the pout of perfect pink lips in a sweet smile, the bronze brown of his skin, even his lovingly shaped, alluring build.And yet the human felt a sudden sickness in his stomach.
Tensely, Tadeo took a step back, one hand reaching for the holster of his gun on instinct only to find his fingers grasping at his weaponless waistband.“Devil,” left his mouth, but it sounded like a question.“Devil,” he said firmer.“You were—” That brilliant smile was so terribly familiar.“I know you— You were Father Ángel?”
“I spent a long time looking for you,” Satan replied, voice precious silk.“I learned of a Beast, but even once I had, I didn’t know which human of all the ones here you could be.”The boy’s single eye twitched.“Eventually, I learned that some priests knew of you, and that some criminals knew of you, as well.I could have disguised myself as either, but I’m very good at praying.I was an angel once, didn’t you know?”The devil half-turned, took some steps, as if just to remind Tadeo how narrow the road was.“The angel with you knows.”
At Tadeo’s side, Dina was wide-eyed.He looked at the monster who’d destroyed paradise, half-expecting a primal rage to build up within himself for all of Satan’s wickedness that had bled and scarred Heaven as much as the Earth.Instead, the angel’s mind and heart were hollow.All the anger that should be there was missing, like he’d forgotten it happened at all, forgotten why he was here.Only Apsinthos spoke — ‘Don’t listen to him, Dina.Do not trust him.Do not believe him.He will ruin it all.’‘Ruin?’
The human furrowed his brow at the silent Dina, then turned back to Satan and answered, “I don’t care what you’ve come for.You’re nothing more to me than another criminal.I’ll rip you to pieces like I’ve done to them, like I’ve done to the soldiers.”
Satan addressed Dina: “Uriel looks for you, Dina.”
Eyes widening — “Uriel…?”‘Don’t listen,’ the star urged.‘He lies, Dina.He’s the king of lies.’
“He arrived like a horseman from the north, and he has brought death with him from Heaven.He holds his name in your mouth, Dina.I saw him.He’s looking for you.He says… you’re trying to save the world.Is that true?”
‘It’s a lie,’ said Apsinthos again as the angel felt his heart sink, and suddenly, he felt.He remembered.Uriel telling him to stop the end times from coming.‘The war, Dina,’ Apsinthos urged, ‘think of the war.’The Heaven after the war, nearly all of the Heaven he’d ever known, the roads for the sinners, the penance, and then the Watchers, and Satan’s feet tapping against the table as he taught young Dina to dance.Then the warmth of the devil’s breath by his ear, his serpentine tongue flickering at the lobe.Satan’s first victim.His plaything — Dina.And Dina’s jaw clenched, in a way it’d never had.An anger that felt as ancient as he was.Dina was ancient; he had never felt the expanse of time that trailed from his shadow but he did now.“Be silent,” he whispered, “Satan.”
“Answer me,” Satan snickered.“Are you here to save the world from the apocalypse, Dina?”
Tadeo interjected with an angry shout: “Look around you, Satan!Look at all the horror you have caused!Look at me!”He met the devil’s humor with some hysteric, high-pitched laugh of his own, then lifted a hand to grip the bandages over the burrow in the right side of his skull.His fingers slipped between the white, felt the wet ooze of meat.“You don’t know— You don’t know how much I’ve suffered because of the evil of man.And you are responsible.You are responsible!”Satan tilted his head, almost curiously.“You will…” Tadeo felt himself tense, a flash of the smell of blood in his nose, of sweat, of men; and his voice began to shake.“You will never know what it is like to suffer the evil that you have created.”
“It is all my fault?”asked Satan, almost gently.
Tadeo despised that answer, how playful it was.His heart had risen to his throat, and his eyes were instantly burning.He spat, “God will have you burned!For what you’ve done!God will destroy you!”His breath was coming faster, and he wanted to reach for the crucifix beneath his shirt to ground him back to the present but it was missing, burnt to nothing in Hell.And now the sound of his own panting made him think of men, of a dirt ground, of a lot.The resurrection he’d suffered for.“For all the evil that is your creation, that we have all had to suffer and die for, you will burn!”
“Does it,” answered Satan, “make you feel better to think so?”
