Through Flame and Blade

CH. 7 Getting Closer to the Enemy

*Chiara

There was something wrong about bantering with a demon about the hundreds of women he had satisfied, but it kept Chiara sane in the darkness. Better his voice than the aching whispers of her thousand wounds. She shivered into her wings despite the throbbing ache in her back at the joints.

Her wings were a screaming agony. She knew now that she would never use them again. She also had a secret—and she had almost let it slip to the enemy.

To Logan.

Logan was her enemy and she had almost let him know she wasn't fully healing anymore. She had to remind herself over and over, when at the end of every day—it was his presence that stopped the screams after the torturers were gone. It had been a couple of months according to her estimation that she was brought here. For the first few days, she was careful to count.

But then the counting became hoping. The angels might notice she was missing from among the dead. They might come for her. Surely, her brother would be called from his mission. He would know she was alive, and try to come for her.

After a few weeks the hoping and the counting were unbearable. No one would come. The days blurred. Her existence blurred. Logan's voice found her in the darkness, and she clung to it like the pathetically weak and despairing thing she had become.

Once, she had been a warrior. She had trained dawn to dusk and sparred with the greatest teachers to test her strength. She was unmatched in her corps, and the only female to be moved to the battalion. Glory stopped there, though. Her very first battle was a slaughter and she was failure who couldn't even die correctly. No one was coming to the depths of hell to save her. No angel ever returned from Hell. At least not as an angel.

They never came back as angels.

There were stories of things that used to be angels coming back, unleashed from hell and controlled only by their demon masters. Being taken alive and tortured was only the beginning of her agony. How much longer could she hold out?

She turned her face into the feathers below her. They scratched and stunk with the filth that coated them, but she sank into the memory of what they used to be. Her mind refused to be still. How long would it take for her to turn? Would she manage to die before that? A tear slid from her eye, making a hot trail down her nose. Only one tear. She would not be weak anymore.

Zeigfel was back the next day. And the day after that, but Lucius was nowhere to be seen, nor his horrible servant. Dirk lifted her arms to the cuffs hanging high from the ceiling against the wall. Then left her alone.

Where was Lucius? Another battle on the surface? Not knowing was unbearable. Waiting was unbearable. Logan's suffering was unbearable.

The third day, after he flayed Logan's back, Dirk prepared the wheel, so Zeigfel could break Logan's bones as he threaded limbs through the spokes. Lucius hadn't come or sent a messenger, again, but Logan's pain was picking apart her heart, reverberating in her bones until she ached, as surely as it destroyed his body.

He panted. His head was down, but the glimpses she had of his face told her a terrifying story. An unfamiliar expression painted it. He was going to break. Absolutely and fully. He would become Zeigfel's thing, an obedient minion, a mindless monster.

There was only way she could stop it from happening. She knew what it would cost her.

She lifted her head. "Isn't anybody else tired of his voice? Make it stop. Please. I'm begging. He's such an easy target, I can't believe anyone would enjoy spending this amount of time and effort on hearing him cry. He's worse than the girls in my corps who didn't make the final cut."