Witch Road to Take (2 page)

Zombie stepped forward. Her voice was higher
pitched but as cold as ice. “You’ve no choice. You’ve made us chase
you around the world for three months and now you won’t get off
this building without us taking you down.”

“The only reason you caught me now, Zombie,
is because I let you catch me. You can never outrun me, nor can you
keep up with me.”

She growled and took two steps forward. I
stood still, my hands at my sides, my knees slightly bent, ready to
play with these mutts. And play rough.

“Tell my father that I’m upstairs if he
wants me. Let him know that I’m playing with my chew toys.”

Wolf began to pace, a low rumbling growl in
his throat. He seethed, curled back his lips and exposed his razor
sharp teeth. He was ready to attack. He leapt through the air
toward me. I squatted down, swung my left arm outward in a sweeping
motion, and sent him across the top of the roof. I quickly turned
my attention to Zombie, ready for her attack.

Zombie growled, “As I said, you’ve no
choice. Your father has instructed us to bring you back…dead or
alive. And dead is just fine with us.”

A gust of wind hit my face as my brother
flew past me. He had wrapped his hand around Zombie’s neck before I
even knew what was happening. Blood dripped from the puncture wound
made by my brother’s sharp nails, and dripped down her fur and into
an acrid, steaming puddle on the ground, a puddle from which small
flames briefly leapt on the concrete roof and then subsided. My
brother, in all his glory, had transformed into his beast.

Damien, as his beast, was both beautiful and
terrifying. His eyes were a blinding red—a red so deep that it hurt
to look directly into them. His nails were long and razor sharp and
his already long hair had suddenly grown three inches longer. His
facial features were rugged and dark, formidable. My brother—my
protector—had not yet said anything, but everyone stopped and
listened.

Wolf took a step back. “Damien, it’s your
father’s orders.”

“Then my father can come claim his daughter,
but he will not send his hellhounds here to threaten my sister,”
Damien growled. His eyes singed Zombie with his demonic rage.

Zombie yelped.

As exciting as it was to see my brother
change into his natural being—his inner beast released into an
outer one—I knew I was pushing my luck. I walked up behind him and
put my hand on his shoulder. He glanced back at me and read the
plea in my eyes. He released Zombie from her yelping misery and
took a step back.

Zombie shook her head several times as she
snapped once at Damien, being careful not to again cross that line
with him by attacking me.

Wolf stepped forward and stood side by side
with Zombie. Both of them were silent, waiting.

“Very well. I will go but only because I am
ready. It’s time for me to face him. It’s time for me to demand my
freedom and end this relentless pursuit of me.”

“When you face Father, remember that he
hates weakness,” Damien reminded me.

I placed the palm of my hand on the side of
his cheek and thanked him with a quick nod. He stared into my eyes,
knowing that this was not going to be an easy feat. Father could be
unreasonable, manipulating and stubborn, and Damien knew that
Father always won.

Not this time.

When I turned around, Zombie and Wolf were
on each side of me and they both wrapped their mouths around my
wrists. I was their prisoner now, but I didn’t struggle. There was
no reason to. I knew where we were going.

A portal hole with red and yellow fire
spitting from the mouth of the passage opened a few feet away. The
gust of intense heat reminded me why I hated everything about
downstairs. I was ready to face
him
and plead with him to
release me from his suffocating, strong grip. I wanted to seek my
own destiny. No, I wanted to
make
my own destiny.
It was
time.

I glanced over my shoulder as I allowed the
hounds to lead me into the mouth of the portal. They could have
taken off my hands at the wrists, but their mission was to retrieve
me, not maim me. In a twisted way, I trusted them not to spill my
blood. I knew that I was more valuable to my father alive than
dead. No matter what Zombie had said—dead or alive—I knew that
Father was not through with meddling…in my
life
.

As the passage closed, the hellhounds and me
inside of it, I looked up. Damien stood with his fists at his
sides, his veins pulsating in his neck. There was so much love in
his eyes—love for me.

I stood alone in
my
bedroom, anxiously waiting behind a locked door. There would be no
escape from my imprisonment. I might as well have been locked in a
bank vault. I knew my father would make me wait a substantial
amount of time before he paid me a visit and addressed my
rebellious behavior in one of his terrifying tirades that never
failed to shake my courage and make me knuckle under to his
demands. Once Father had me trapped in my bedroom, he was never in
a hurry to unlock my door.

Thankfully, my room, although dull, had a
bed, a dresser, a desk and a laptop. My internet connection came
from the house upstairs, just above my bedroom. Of course, upstairs
was what we called Earth. There were levels to everywhere, though I
had never ventured above upstairs. It would have been unthinkable
to explore there, especially for me.

I spent very little time downstairs in Hell,
in fact, as little time as possible. My father was a tyrant, and I
could not stand the smell or the screams when souls were tortured.
Oddly, one wouldn’t think there’d be a smell, but the human portion
of my senses was delicate to my surroundings. My greatest fight
against my father was the fact that he wanted me to work in the
acid pit.

He denied me the right to work in the
torture pit, which was the easiest of the three. Souls that killed
to protect loved ones spent eternity there.

Nor would he let me work in the oil pit,
which he used for souls who disobeyed the Halo Man’s rules. Another
job would have been a vacation spot compared to the acid pit.

No, if Father had anything to say about
it—and he would—the worst of the three pits was to be my lot in
life. Instead of the torture pit or the oil pit, Father wanted me
to handle the acid pit. This was the worst of the three and only
souls who had committed the most heinous of crimes ended up there.
For some reason, my father wanted
me
to work in that
pit.

Why me?

My father’s expectations that I would work
in the acid pit had been a good reason for me to run away from
downstairs. Not that there weren’t other good reasons, but the acid
pit, filled with the most hardened and unremorseful criminals of
all time—including Jack the Ripper and those of his ilk—terrified
me beyond belief. Even though I was the daughter of Satan, it was
beyond my youthful understanding how a human could be that evil.
Half human and half…demon…for lack of a better word, I had always
believed that my human DNA was the softer side of my existence.
Looking at the occupants of the acid pit convinced me that some
humans were worse than most of the demons I knew, including my
father.

With my back against the wall and my legs
stretched out on my bed, I contemplated how I would approach my
father about my fate. I would be lectured and expected, when I
became an adult, to take up important duties in the family
business—duties that Father would decide.

There just had to be a way to explain to him
that I was not the kind of girl who thrived on the torture thing.
Although I was his daughter that didn’t mean that I wanted to take
on the family business of administering torture or even overseeing
it done by lesser demons. After all, my mother was a human witch,
and that made me part human. Though Father had always downplayed my
half-humanity, it rose up in me like a Santa Ana wind whose job it
was to whisk away toxins in a polluted environment.

I dreaded the upcoming confrontation with my
father and began twisting my hair over the side of my right
shoulder because I was nervous. I’d run away from our home in Hell
for three months, and for that three months of absence, I had no
doubt that he would impound me for an equal three-month punishment
for no other reason than for his own personal satisfaction and to
even the score. Three months for three months. Satan wasn’t just
good at his job, he reveled in it and applied his own sense of
justice to all proceedings of Hell as if he was running a
corporation.

Rules, rules, rules. He was made of
them.

It was the stench of rotted flesh, from his
dealings in the pit, which indicated my father’s arrival. That, and
the way that he broke my door when he slammed it open, making the
hinges and the deadbolts fly. Father liked to make a dramatic
entrance. It was a given. I was probably on my tenth bedroom
door.

His smell was going to make me gag and the
force of the broken door slamming into the wall made my metal desk
vibrate. His break-in pierced my ears with so many decibels that my
eardrums thrummed.

He was fuming, literally, with acrid
sulfurous smoke rising from the top of his head. I was scared. More
than scared, I was completely terrified. When my seven-foot-tall
father stood in my doorway, fully transformed into the malevolent
red Lucifer, acid dripping from his pores and burning holes in my
carpet, I thought twice about pissing him off any further.

I sat on my bed with my back against my
headboard and swallowed, loudly. Even if I wanted to move, there
was no way that I could. I was petrified.

My father had his long arms crossed over his
chest. He clicked his nails against the metal around his biceps,
while his horns, which were now erect, were thick and strong. I had
only seen my father’s horns twice since my birth, and each time,
they frightened me senseless.

Father stepped into my bedroom with Wolf and
Zombie in tow. I didn’t like the smirks on the mutts’ gnarly faces,
but they were the least of my concerns.

Mustering up all my bravery, I slowly
maneuvered to the edge of my bed and put both feet on the floor—my
mute metaphor that I was going to stand my ground. It took
everything in me to rise up off that bed and stand in front of my
father. No doubt, he’d expect such obedience, even from me. My long
legs trembled like an ostrich on a tightrope.

His voice bellowed with a roar that shook my
room. “You are
forbidden
to leave this room. You are
forbidden
to go upstairs and conspire with humans, and you
are now
forbidden
to have that piece of junk on your
desk.”

My eyes flew to where he had glanced. He was
referring to my laptop. My heart dropped and dread crept over me.
“You can’t do that.”

“I can do whatever I want. I am the king of
the underworld, and you are my servant,” his voice roared, blowing
my hair off my face. Drops of acid spittle burned my cheek and it
took all that I had in me not to wipe away the drops and react
compulsively. Not that I could beat Lucifer at anything.

I stood my ground and remembered my secret
personal motto:
Keep calm and don’t upset Father.

“I am not your servant, I am your daughter.
Your flesh-and-blood daughter, and an important member of your
royal dynasty.” I wanted that to be as powerful as his voice, but
those last words came out more like a helpless cry, a last-ditch
effort to stand my ground. I cringed at my own words.

“I can’t believe you pulled that royal
dynasty card. I suppose you think you are clever.” An evil chuckle
sent his spittle onto my comforter. The acid-like saliva burned
pinholes where it landed. “A daughter would respect her role as
my
daughter. But you mock me with the naked trickery of your
half-breed humanity!”

“I like humans. They treat me with
respect.”

He glared at me. His eyes were literally
singeing my skin. I moved out of his direct glare, but his eyes
followed me. His fingers played with the greasy goatee at his
pointed chin. “You have developed a love for those rodents
upstairs. Even, I noticed, your compassion for them.”

I nodded, unsure what to say. I had found my
human friends full of mystery and intrigue. They were part of my
family tree and although I didn’t know any one human that well, I
enjoyed watching them from afar.

“You are
not
my daughter. You are a
rebellious replica of your mother. You will spend your life in the
pits with all the other souls.”

I stepped back and tilted my head, horrified
at the seriousness of those words. “Daddy?!”

I called him that for the first time since I
was a little girl—before I knew he was Satan—and before I knew his
personification of evil.

“I am not ‘Daddy.’ I am your lord and
master. What do your humans call it? Tough love? Apparently, you
only understand the human way of doing things, so, as of today, you
are no longer my daughter. You are nothing to me. Less than
nothing.” He turned to leave.

Out of nowhere, Damien appeared in front of
me, fully transformed into the demonic creature of mystic
greatness. His voice was loud, deep and authoritative. “Father, you
will not discard my sister.”

My heart skipped a beat when I saw my father
stop dead in his tracks. I would never want to cause my brother any
harm. If he thought he could take on Lucifer, he was sadly
mistaken. Even I knew that.

Father turned and faced us. “How dare you
tell me what I won’t do? Have you forgotten who I am?”

“No, sir, I have not.” Damien bowed. “You
are rightfully upset with Dhellia, but there is a way to fix this
that will benefit us all.”

Father took a casual step toward us and
gracefully swiped his hand in the air, throwing Damien’s body
across the room. He slammed into the wall, fell on top of my desk
and then landed against the concrete floor, the breath knocked out
of him. Father turned to leave.