Bryce

I breathed a sigh of relief after sending Lilith the last message. She was keeping the connection open, just like she said she would, and was even going out of her way to make sure I felt her at the back of my mind. Which was definitely something I appreciated, despite having every intention of ignoring her advice to lie low.

If this ‘institute’ managed to bring me back while in Tess’s afterlife, then I didn't think I would be safe until I figured out how they were tracking me.

With that being said, I wasn’t about to just waltz out into the open while covered in blood and wearing the scraps of cloth that were once my clothing. I needed to at least have some level of deniability if I were caught. So, I moved over to the lifeless devil and started stripping him.

He was a bit taller than me, and his clothes had obviously been tailored for a man, but they would fit well enough to fool somebody at a distance. First, though, I needed to do something about, well, me. Mother hadn’t exactly kept my dignity in mind while she was tearing into me the last couple of days, and what was left of my outfit couldn’t really be called clothing.

Oddly, the lack of coverage was something of a relief, since anything touching my skin felt excruciating. Which meant this next part was going to suck. I stripped down as delicately as I could, only hissing in pain a couple dozen times, and then got started on the next step of my plan. Dealing with the blood.

Cleaning magic was one of the earliest types that I had taught myself when I was first learning to cast. Not to say that it was necessarily the easiest type to learn, just that as a child, I really liked magic and really hated having to waste time cleaning. Thankfully, I still felt that way, and had cast my preferred cleaning spell countless times over the years. Which allowed me to convert it to use my new mana in only a few minutes.

Once that was done, and I was no longer covered in my own blood, I started changing into the devil’s black and red uniform. Mentally, I knew that the fabric touching my skin wasn’t doing any actual damage, but that didn’t change the fact that wearing it felt like I was burning alive.

Or the fact that I had no idea how long it had been since Mother left. Unsurprisingly, my implants weren’t working, and I seriously didn’t trust my mental state enough to guess at how much time had passed. The safest bet was to assume that Mother could return any second. Which meant I needed to leave as soon as possible. So, I let out a slow, shaky breath before straightening my back and confidently stepping through the door.

Clearly, whoever was running this place was trying to give it an air of legitimacy, because it felt like I had just stepped through a portal into the warmly lit hall of an elegant hotel. The walls were a deep crimson with delicate golden designs, and an exotic looking black wood covered the exterior of the doors.

I could see three other rooms from where I stood, but since the one nearest mine was labeled as twenty-seven, it felt fair to assume there were more around the corner. Incidentally, I had been in room twenty-six, and I could see twenty-five on the wall across from me further down the hall. I now had a choice to make, and as far as I could tell, there was no clear answer.

Either I could go right, where the numbers were descending, and I assumed the exit would be, or I could go left. Deeper into this nightmare.

It should have been obvious, but going directly towards the exit felt like the quickest way to get caught, and there was no guarantee that there would be a way out in the other direction. To complicate things further, I didn’t just need to get away. I also needed to be certain that I wouldn’t end up back here after I left, which meant making sure they didn’t have a way to track me.

I resigned myself to going deeper into the ‘hotel’ when I heard a pair of voices coming from that direction. I fought against the panic, and carefully pulled the door closed behind me as I stepped across the hall and pushed through the door labeled twenty-seven. That might have seemed like a strange thing to do, but that’s only because it very much was.

In retrospect, I could have just gone back into the room I came from and waited for whoever was coming to pass, but the very idea of being trapped in there again repulsed me. Which was why I was now standing in a nearly identical room across from a very confused devil.

“How did you—oh shit, you killed him,” she cursed, and I closed the door before rushing across the room to push her against the wall and cover her mouth.

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“Listen to me very carefully, because I’m not about to repeat myself.” Speaking still tore at my throat, but I pushed through the pain as I glared into the terrified woman’s black eyes. “There’s some information I need, and you can either give it to me or I can rip the answers directly from your soul. Nod if you understand.” She nodded, so I continued. “I’m going to let go of your mouth so you can talk, but if you do anything I don’t like, then I’m going to kill you the same way I killed your friend. Understand?” She nodded again, so I let go of her mouth, but still held her against the wall.

“Tyris was my brother, not my friend.” She spat at me, and I wiped it off my face without losing eye contact.

“He was a sadist and deserved exactly what he got.” I pushed a thread of mana through my arm and into her chest, then wrapped it tightly around her soul. “Now, tell me what I have to do to make sure whoever is running this place can’t find me after I escape.”

“There’s nothing you can do.” She laughed at me. “Even if you somehow make it out of here, then we can just summon you back. Tess’s wards can’t even hide you from us. Besides, it’s not like she’d accept you back in her afterlife, anyway. Not after what we’ve done to you.”

“What did you do?”

“We carved runes into your bones before we resurrected you. The ones on your spine should’ve activated by now, searing an entirely different set directly onto your soul.”

“Oh? Is that it?” I smiled at the devil. “And here I was worried I’d have to go searching.”

I closed my eyes and turned my senses inward to inspect the damage. Obviously, I couldn’t see anything physical like this, but the runework on my bones was so extensive that I could make out nearly my entire skeleton. The runes themselves were so densely packed that it was impossible to see any individual spell. Then there was the enchantment on my soul.

The good news was that I could actually read that one, and the bad news was that meant I had a general sense of what it did, and from what I could see, it was nasty. The enchantment itself had two parts, the first was designed to inflict crippling pain if my soul got separated from my body, and the second would act as a beacon to the caster, making it easy for them to summon me no matter where I was. It worked kind of like one of Ithnaa’s tokens, but dialed up to eleven.

On top of all of that, there were at least four separate wards designed to prevent me from dispelling the damn thing while it was inside my body. Triggering any one of them would alert the caster and likely activate a summoning circle in a dungeon somewhere.

Then, just to make matters worse, it seemed like the runes on my bones would just recreate the enchantment if I somehow dispelled it. The entire system was fiendish.

“Well? Like what you see?” the devil asked. I could hear the sneer in her voice. “Prince Al’kais’s work is unparalleled. I don’t care how close you are to divinity. There’s no way you’re getting past his runes.”

“A demon prince did this?” I asked without opening my eyes. I had a few ideas already, but I would only get one shot, so I didn’t want to rush it.

“That’s right. Now, do you realize how fucked you are?”

“Purely out of curiosity, does Prince Al’kais know that I’m a member of Lilith’s household?” She didn’t answer, so I opened my eyes to see her worried expression. “Well? Does he?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, completely unable to hide her concern. “Lilith can’t leave Hel. She won’t save you.”

I chuckled to myself as I closed my eyes and went back to studying the enchantment. I had only brought up Lilith’s name because of her past relationship with Orrid and of how highly Lady Tenebris seemed to regard her.

Those were the only two demon princes that I had ever met, and they both not only knew Lilith, but seemed to respect her on some level. I had hoped that meant Prince Al’kais would too, but based on this devil’s reaction, it seemed like her name carried even more weight than I thought.

“You’re right, she won’t,” I admitted, as I started spinning millions of microscopic tendrils of mana all along my meridians and assigned them to search out an individual rune carved into my bones. Then I took the thread I still had wrapped around the devil’s soul and linked it to the spell seared into my own. Finally, I opened my eyes and smiled as I finished my response. “Because she won’t have to. Tell Prince Al’kais that I’m coming for him next.”

All at once, I tore the runes from my bones and slipped the spell off my soul, transferring it to the devil before dispelling it. Her eyes went wide, but she disappeared before she could scream.

I fell forward, panting, as I braced myself against the wall. That had taken a lot out of me, and almost certainly would have been impossible before Tess messed with my mana.

Even with the goddess’s gift, I doubted that I would have been able to pull it off if the enchantments weren’t literally inside my body. That, combined with having a convenient disposable soul nearby, created a perfect storm of sorts that Al’kais never could have predicted.

Speaking of the prince, I had probably just teleported one of his minions right to him. Which meant it was only a matter of time before he raised the alarm, and regardless of what I had told the devil, I really wasn’t looking to fight a demon prince in my condition.

So, I turned to leave. But as I did, I finally noticed a very familiar djinn strapped to the table in the middle of the room and rushed over to free her. “Damnit, Ithnaa, what are you doing here?”