I gasped as my limbs tangled with Luvic’s—or Last’s—and a thick, viscous liquid flooded my mouth. I couldn’t see. My ears were filled with muck. I choked and gagged.
I knocked against someone. I kicked. Somersaulted. Rolled in the greedy muck. My lungs screamed. Someone grabbed my arm, and we sank deeper into the mire.
There was no illusion here. No knots. No shimmering ropes. There was only thick, earthy, placental mud.
I needed air.
I needed to breathe.
But—oh gosh—I knew. As soon as we were spit out into the Den of Depravity, breathing would be our downfall. Perhaps that’s why some babies don’t want to breathe when they’re born: as soon as you leave the womb and take that first shuddering breath . . . you forget.
The world has a way of muddying and clouding the truth. You forget who and what you were. That happens to everyone when they’re born. You forget what it was like to be a soul. You forget what it was like to hear God. It’s easy when you’re in the womb to hear his voice. But then . . . we all forget.
It’s similar when you fall into a Den of Depravity. I always said no one ever escapes a Den, but that’s not strictly true. Nearly three thousand years ago, a Greek poet named Homer fell into a Den, and ten years later, he climbed out. Everything we know about Dens of Depravity we learned from him.
First, the air is an amnesiac. It’s like honey dripping through your mind, coating all its nooks and crannies, causing you to forget the world outside the Den. Sort of. You remember it, but it takes on an unreal sheen, and you don’t ever want to go back. Why? Because the Den is seductive. It’s the place where every pleasure, every desire you’ve ever had, is acted out to its fullest form.
It feels good. It feels right. Doesn’t God want us to be happy? Isn’t the pursuit of happiness our right?
Second, you act out your desires, pursuing pleasure to its very limit. Decadence is your name. You become your pleasure. All the restraint and temperance that held you back from diving headfirst into gluttony, lust, sloth—all of it is wiped away.
Third and finally, once you reach the limits of pleasure and have squeezed out all the nectar you can, the only thing left is pain. Not your pain, but the pain of others. You become depravity, and there’s no going back.
Every person takes on a different face of depravity, but the end result is the same. You’re lost in a mire of pleasure turned pain.
How did Homer get out?
He claimed he kept the light of his love as a beacon to guide him home. That even when he forgot everything else, he didn’t forget her.
But I couldn’t take out my memories of Finn. I couldn’t take out my love for him. If I did, Jagger’s blood would devour it. I couldn’t hold Finn’s love in front of me like a shield. My beacon was locked in my heart. I know Last had no beacon. Did Luvic know to hold onto Cora?
Worse, when we landed, what or who would they become?
I squeezed my eyes tight, my lungs bursting, and tore through my insides, searching for something that could save us.
And there—not locked away, not buried or hidden—I found it.
Do you remember the night I married Finn? We didn’t have wedding rings—we couldn’t wear them. But it turned out we didn’t need them. As soon as we exchanged our vows, I felt an invisible rope knotting itself around us. Tying us together. Binding us in a lover’s knot meant for eternity. That silken rope was still there. Death hadn’t destroyed it. Neither had Jagger’s blood. The Den wouldn’t destroy it either.
I wrapped my heart around the rope—Finn—and held tight.
The next instant, the muck shot me free. I somersaulted through a thick white cloud. It was wet and cold and not at all nice. Then I burst from the cloud and slammed into a grassy, flowering meadow. The hard crash jarred the muck from my lungs, and I coughed it up. Then, on my hands and knees, I reflexively drew in a great, gulping gasp of air.
Oh.
Ohhh.
That was nice.
That was lovely.
Last dropped from the sky, crashing to the grass.
A half-second later, a large, furry, warm body dropped on top of me. It crushed me, and I coughed again. The animal let out a low, rattling growl.
I shoved the beast off, and when I did, I came face-to-face with a snarling jackaltooth. Its hot breath licked my face, and its eyes flashed orange. It bared its teeth. They were as long as my pinkie and sharper than a knife. The mottled gray bristles on the back of its neck stood on end, and its lips curled over its teeth.
It was going to rip out my throat. That was what jackaltooth did. They tore out throats, intestines, and bones.
