‘You may think you’re stronger, Archangel,’ says the Pit lord. ‘But my Pit lord brethren are on their way right now. They all saw us fighting in the sky.’

‘They won’t be here in time to save you,’ says Cyclone.

The Pit lord makes a noise like a thousand snakes slithering over dead leaves. ‘But if you take the time to fight me instead of flying away, the other lords will kill you,’ says the Pit lord. ‘So we have a deadlock.’

He sweeps his burned and sputtering wings forward, then back, as if trying them out. The cut sections bleed all over the ground. ‘I find that I’m in need of a new pair of wings.’

He looks over at Raffe’s wings, which are magnificent beside the Watchers’ mangy ones. ‘Yours are quite nice. A Pit lord with a set of archangel wings would be both respected and feared. There would be much speculation about how he came to possess them. Care to make a deal?’

Raffe laughs.

‘Think on it. No angel becomes an archangel without ambition. Ambition sometimes requires deceit. Sometimes, it requires an army. I can offer both.’

‘Deceit can be found everywhere,’ says Raffe. ‘And it’s freely given.’

‘But an army – now that’s worth something. I have several for rent. For the right price. Interested?’

‘Not for my wings. No one’s ever taking those from me.’ He doesn’t say again.

‘Perhaps you’ll have something else I might want one day.’ The Pit lord looks pointedly at me. ‘If you’re ever interested in something I can provide in exchange for . . .’ – he shrugs – ‘something I want, just bite into this.’

He tosses a small, round item strung on a thong. Raffe doesn’t bother to catch it, and it lands at his feet. It looks like a strung-up dried apple. Dark and wrinkly. I’m not sure I’d eat it if I were dying of starvation.

‘When you bite into it, it’ll bring me to wherever you are so we can talk details,’ says the Pit lord as he climbs onto his chariot.

Cyclone takes a step toward the chariot. The Pit lord’s hellions and Consumed bare their teeth at him.

Raffe puts out a hand to stop him. ‘We’re not here to fight.’

‘He’s only offering a bargain to save face,’ says Cyclone. ‘He won’t win this, and he knows it.’

‘Neither will we.’ Raffe nods to the sky. Three chariots fly toward us. Behind them is a cloud of hellions.

The Pit lord in front of us cracks his whip at the angels harnessed to his chariot. The Consumed whip heads cut into the angels, who are drenched with bloody sweat trickling down their hard bodies. They take off into the air.

As soon as the chariot is on its way, the Watchers circle Flyer, who is lying on the ground. His back is clearly broken, by the look of the unnatural bend of his body.

His head shifts back and forth on the ground, so I assume he’s alive. But as we lean over him, the shifting motion of his head becomes more and more wrong.

His neck tears, bubbling blood.

I jump back.

Teeth gnaw out from the inside of Flyer’s neck, quickly chewing through. A Consumed whip head covered in blood emerges from Flyer’s neck.

I look away, wishing I could wipe out what I just saw. From the edge of my vision, I see Cyclone grab a rock and hoist it above his head. Then I hear a wet crunch.

Everyone’s shoulders seem to slump at the same time.

‘You have to get us out of here, Commander,’ says Hawk with heavy sadness in his voice. ‘This isn’t how we were meant to die.’

40

We move out of the area before the other Pit lords arrive. Some of us walk, while some of us fly low and scout ahead.

I keep expecting someone to ask about my sword, but no one does. The Watchers seem a little shell-shocked after seeing Flyer die. It’s like tragedy happens too often yet they still can’t accept it.

The broken street we’re on ends abruptly as the town ruins disintegrate into a rocky desert. I keep an eye out for hellions to catch along the way, but I don’t see any. They must have either run off or been recruited to fight for the Pit lords when they were gathering to come at us.

The sky is changing into what I guess is the equivalent of daylight here. Instead of the purple black I’d seen earlier, there’s now a red glow casting a fiendish tint over the desert – not quite night, not quite day.

One of the Watchers sighs beside me. ‘Most of us made it through another night.’

‘Let’s go back into that street tonight,’ says another. ‘Safer there.’

I throw them a sidelong glance. They have fresh gashes across their faces and arms. One of them is limping and bleeding from a missing chunk out of his leg.

‘How long have you guys been here?’ I ask.

The guys give me weary looks as if to say forever.

‘No idea,’ says one. ‘Since before I was born, I think.’

We walk onto an outcropping of rocks. The desert is full of weird rock towers spiraling up to the red sky, twisted and tortured. In the distance, there are ruins of cities. One of them is on fire, with black smoke rising to the sky.

‘What are those?’ I ask. ‘Are they cities?’

‘Once,’ says Thermo. ‘They’re just death traps now. They used to be hellion cities.’

I turn to Beliel. ‘I thought you said the hellions weren’t much of anything before the Fallen came?’

Beliel sneers. ‘You think it excuses their torture of innocent people just because they used to have cities?’

‘They must have had a nice little primitive society here,’ says Thermo. ‘Lucifer and his army put them in their place quickly enough though.’

Things begin to come together in my head. ‘Is that why they love torturing the newly Fallen?’

‘Who knows why they do the things they do,’ says Beliel. ‘They should be exterminated, not analyzed.’

‘Whatever they used to be, they’ve devolved into lower-class animals,’ says Thermo. ‘I doubt they have any motive other than instinct.’

‘But the newly Fallen are the only angels or demons that they can torment, right?’ I ask. ‘They’re afraid of the seasoned Fallen, aren’t they?’

‘They’d be afraid of us too if the Pit lords weren’t using them to torture us. If there’s one pleasure the Pit lords give them, it’s the job of tormenting us during initiation.’

I nod. Maybe the hellions were so gleeful in hurting Beliel because torturing the newly Fallen is the only revenge they can get for the destruction of their world.