Fallen Ash

Chapter Thirteen: Seth

Ash was too exhausted to keep struggling. Once they had crossed the threshold of the skyscraper's entrance, leaving the night and the cold to mark time behind them, she had already accepted her fate. The automatic doors closed with finality, like the curtains of a play after it's final act. With no strength left in her upper body to keep her head upright, she lay limp, blood rushing to her skull and beginning to feel nauseas on account of it.

Only when they were sequestered in the building's wide, capacious elevator did Heather finally permit Roger to put Ash down. Staggering as her feet touched the ground again, she fell forward, into a pane of glass that offered passengers an extensive view of the outside. It was cool against her forehead and stifled the urge she had to vomit, but when the elevator began its steady ascent up to the thirty-fifth floor, she began to process the changing scene before her. Despite the thudding in her ears and weariness, her dread was briefly reinvigorated. She didn't recognize any of her surroundings. She had no idea where they were.

"Where are we?" Ash demanded.

She felt like she had already walked quite a distance before she had been thrown over Roger's shoulder. The second part of the journey had felt like it had been even longer, although she had struggled violently for a significant portion of it and had likely slowed them down. She couldn't even estimate how many miles out of the center they were.

"This is where Seth and his followers live," Heather explained with an exhausted sigh. "Demons aren't as... subtle as Celestials, let's say. They like to live in spotlight. In the lap of luxury."

Ash pressed her whole body against the glass pane in the elevator as it climbed higher. At the height they would soon reach, she should have been able to see across the entire city, but as they rose above the rest of the buildings, up towards the firmament, everything abruptly dissolved away into inky blackness as if it had been sucked into a vacuum. 

Illuminated by moonlight, the surface of the water was undulating, like the river itself was being churned. 

"We're at the docks," she breathed.

Heather nodded in the reflection of the glass.

The injustice she felt was not easily overwritten by the fascination she felt, seeing the river stretch out before her, cloaked in darkness. In the daytime, she might be able to glimpse the mouth of the ocean or other cities in the distance, but right now it was nothing but a single, shimmering patch. Only when the elevator doors opened with a ping did she find herself plummeting back to reality - and it was jarring this time. Her sense of whimsy evaporated and the awareness that she had been tricked into going to sit in a room with a Demon hit her even harder. She was a dead girl walking. She was probably going to be eaten.

In retrospect it was hardly surprising she had felt so much trepidation when he approached her in the park. She needed to learn to trust her own instinct. 

With her captors on either side, each clutching at one of her arms, Ash was unceremoniously marched down a brightly lit, carpeted corridor towards a surprisingly normal and inoffensive redwood door. Cast in copper, the number "351" had been bolted to it, and she swallowed, fearing that this might be the last door she ever go through. Her only experience with Demons had been across battlefields, and they had certainly tried to vanquish her then. Even if Heather had good intentions in bringing her here, there was nothing to stop them from doing it now while she was vulnerable. 

"Knock - he's expecting us," Heather ordered in a level tone.

Roger, as always, did as he was told, knocking boldly underneath the three copper numbers. Clearing his throat in preparation, he pushed his glasses up his nose and stepped back to wait. The three were silent as they waited in suspense, until there was the sound of a click. A few seconds later, a ruddy face appeared through a crack in the door, eyeing them warily.