AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Eddie was gone. His vision darkened around the edges. Fury and loss filled the aching emptiness inside him.
“Shade?” Uriel touched his arm. “We need to start the gathering.”
In the greenroom below, the hell princes and archangels had gathered at his request. The others could concern themselves with the seals and the state of the world. Shade wanted only one thing; he wanted Eddie back, and she had best be safe and unharmed, or he would end the world. And Wrath would help him do it.
The last thing Eddie remembered was that demon, Ashe, shoving Dee at Shade and then grabbing her. There had been a flash of light, and then blackout.
Until she came to somewhere about as unidentifiable as the inside of a refrigerator, and not much warmer. She was lying on a narrow metal bed bolted to the wall. A thin mattress and an even thinner blanket were the only concessions to comfort.
To her left in the roughly three by three meter room was a stainless-steel sink and a toilet. Both also bolted to the wall. A large, studded door—also metal—faced her cot with a dark window in the top third.
Committing to the metallic decorating theme, the walls and ceilings were also made of seamless sheets of stainless steel. She was trapped in a metal box.
A plastic bottle of water stood on the floor beside her cot.
Raging thirst encouraged her to crack the seal and give it an experimental sniff. It smelled like water. She dipped her finger into the bottle and tested a drop with the tip of her tongue. It tasted like standard bottled water. Not the fancy kind, but the grocery store kind.
Still, Eddie had seen enough spy movies to know about things like tasteless and odorless drugs, so she kept her sip small.
As far as a quick examination of her body could tell her, she hadn’t been harmed in any other way. But someone had removed her clothes, and she now wore a shapeless gray tracksuit and thick socks. She pushed that thought into a box in her mind. If she thought about someone stripping her while she was unconscious, she would lose it.
A more thorough examination of her cell revealed a depressing lack of any possible way out, other than through the door.
She added how long she’d been here to her growing tally of shit she didn’t know.
It was light in the cell, but she couldn’t see any source for that light.
Fear, her new companion, tightened her throat. She couldn’t sit here and wait for whatever was coming, because she was willing to bet it wouldn’t be good. After getting up from her cot, she hunted around the space again for clues.
The only sound came from the soft pad of her feet against the floor. She turned the tap on, and then flushed the toilet to break the oppressive silence.
“Okay, Eddie.” The sound of her voice grounded her. “You need to think.”
She’d been in hell, almost at Shade’s demesne, when Ashe and his demon horde had attacked.
“The attack must have been a diversion,” she said. Had she been the target all along?
The air stirred, and she became aware of a chemical smell. Her head grew light, and she had to sit down before she fell. Her knees gave out, and she dropped on her cot. She’d been drugged. Eddie wanted to fight the effect, but her brain felt slow and her eyes heavy.
The door hissed open, and a large figure materialized from the dark corridor into the light of her room. “Hello, Edme.”
It took her sluggish brain a while to put a name to the figure. “Ashe.” Her voice sounded slurred and raspy.
He held up the tray in his hand. “I brought you something to eat.” Strolling closer, he laid the tray beside her on her cot.
Eddie blinked at it and tried to bring it into focus. “You drugged me.”
“Not me personally,” Ashe said. His voice sounded like it was speaking to her from down a long tunnel. “But, yes. If you were human, that would have knocked you out, but as it is…” He shrugged.
“Where am I?”
Ashe chuckled. “Why do people always ask that first?”
Now Eddie was not on the top of her game, but it seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to her. “Wanna know.”
“Of course you do.” Ashe patted her shoulder.
Eddie tried to jerk away from him and nearly threw herself off the cot.
