“May this sacred thong grant eternal salvation to Ramel. May his spirit be forever entwined with divine light. May this lashing bring clarity to his soul, revealing the truth of all existence and guiding him toward righteousness. Let this gift be a vessel of divine connection, binding Ramel to the higher plane, never to be lost to the darkness again.”
I rolled my eyes.
For fuck’s sake.
“Just get it over with, you prick,” I snapped, but Yahweh only smiled and assumed His position behind me.
“We will start with five,” He said softly, and I felt myself tense. Five was fine. I could do five. The first lash sliced through my back, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t hold back a shout of pain. Shemhazai and I liked to play with whips in the bedroom, but we rarely cut through flesh. Yahweh had definitely sliced through muscle and hit bone. I grit my teeth and snarled.
“Oh yeah, baby,harder,”I hissed, refusing to let them see weakness. Rafael chuckled.
“We’ll see if you’re still begging for more by the time we’re done,” he sneered, and I gave him a dark look as the whip came down on me once more.
“She’s screaming again,” Rafael told me as I flinched under the cut of the whip. I couldn’t see the portal, but Raf was looking into it over my shoulder with afucked up little smile on his face. “It won’t be long before she comes for you. I don’t think even Shemhazai can hold her back now. She’s in afrenzy.”
“You’re a fucking bitch, Rafael. Maybe if you sucked your daddy’s cock a little better, He wouldn’t need to get His rocks off whipping the shit out of me,” I sneered, and Raf’s face went red with fury. The whip came down again, and I shouted out a bark of pain. I was panting now, and I could feel wetness pouring down my back. He was slicing me up fuckinggood.
Rafael came closer and leaned down to whisper in my ear, his clean, soapy scent making my stomach roil.
“If the whipping doesn’t work, we’ll be hitting you with the scepter next.” He glanced up over my shoulder again, and a sinister smile curled across his face. “Though it looks like we won’t need to, she’s on her way.” He grabbed my face and forced me to turn. I felt the blood drain from my face as I saw Lilith tear out of Shem’s arms and bolt for the bedroom door. He tried to chase after her, but she blasted him back with a burst of rot, and it hit him in the chest, significantly slowing him down. He glanced back at me, his face white with panic, and I knew she was coming for me. She was coming here.
They had won.
Alexa, play ‘Dead Man,’ David Kushner
Year: 2348 BC
“Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”
—MOTHER TERESA
Ihad never known terror like I did the moment I saw Lilith enter Heaven through the pearly gates. She was a perfect little ink spill in the center of a yawning ivory wasteland, and I nearly wept with fear and rage.
“Lilith! No! Go back to Hell!” I shouted, but she only had eyes for me. Shem stumbled in behind her, his shoulder still half-rotted from where she had hit him with her magic. He reached out with his good arm to grab her.
“Lilith, we need to go back; you can’t be here,” I heard him plead, but she shrugged him off. Angels swarmed them, and she rotted them away before my eyes. For a moment, I watched in awe. She was all-powerful and her death magic seeped out of her, corrupting everything it touched.
We had underestimated her. She was going to make it. She was going to make it to me, and the three of us were going to get out of here and go home…
Thwack!
My soul rattled in the cage of my body, and I vomited. The violence of my retching surprised me, and I looked down to see that a gush of black sludge had erupted from my mouth into the clouds before me.
What the…
I glanced around and realized that Rafael had just struck me with thatfuckingscepter.
Lilith froze.
Shem stopped moving.
Everything went silent.
“Lilith, welcome to Heaven,” Yahweh said, sounding as if He were greeting an old friend for dinner. “We have been waiting for you.” He gestured to me lazily.
“Let him go,” Lilith said, her voice dark and full of rage and sorrow. “I’ll give you whatever you want, just let Ramel go.”
“Anything I want?” Yahweh asked calmly, and she nodded.
