Scorn of Angels by John Patrick Kennedy Page B

dungeons.”
    “How long to get there?” asked Persephone.
    “Not too long if we move at speed,” said Nyx. “Hard to get out of, though.”
    “Of course,” said Persephone. “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be ours to do, would it?”
    Nyx managed a smile and opened the door.
    Lucifer had decorated his castle to be a tribute both to his power and to his sexual proclivities. Every wall had souls chained to it, most facing inward so they couldn’t see what torments awaited them. All the souls were being attended to by demons. Some had small ones that bit or clawed or ripped them open and crawled inside. Others were at the mercy of incubi and succubi—demons of sexual prowess—who violated the souls mercilessly while they ripped the skin from the soul’s flesh with their talons, and lapped at the exposed tissue with their rough tongues. Many other souls were impaled on various-sized implements.
    “Do you think he’s secretly insecure?” asked Persephone after surveying one soul. “Or just suffering from a lack of imagination?”
    “Lucifer never was one of the smart ones,” said Nyx. “Quiet now.”
    They reached the bottom of the staircase and ran hand in hand through hallways deliberately made too small for flying. They passed half a hundred Angels unseen, even when they had to squeeze between the Angels and the edges of the doorways they were guarding.
    And everywhere they went, every demon stopped what it was doing and sniffed the air, nostrils flaring. They could not see Nyx and Persephone as they went past. But they could smell their Angelic signatures. And so every demon they passed left what it was doing and followed.
    Through the castle Nyx and Persephone went, down staircases decorated with skins flayed from souls, demons, and occasionally Angels. They went through hallways where each step was on the silently screaming face of a tortured soul’s severed head, and others where souls had been encased in Hellstone, save for their faces, which were under continuously flowing Hellfire.
    And the farther they went, the more demons followed.
    The dungeon stairs and walls were lit with torches of Hellfire, burning in the mouths of souls whose bodies had been impaled on spikes that forced their heads up so the Hellfire could not drain. The dungeon itself was a huge open pit, with a thousand souls being tortured by demons. Racks, flaying knives, teeth, claws, needles, pincers, and hundreds of other instruments were in constant use by nimble, many-fingered demons that chortled gleefully as they made the souls scream and beg.
    Nyx and Persephone both spotted Ishtar at the same time.
    Ishtar was bent over a bar with Hellstone spikes poking out of it and ripping through her body. Her arms and legs and wings were chained wide open, and tiny demons skittered up and down her flesh, gnawing on it in delight. A thick spike had been driven through the length of Ishtar’s body, going in her sex and out her mouth. The bottom end was T-shaped to prevent Ishtar backing off of it. The part that came out her mouth had been shaped into a vessel. It was sized to cover Ishtar’s head and was filled with Hellfire. Ishtar’s hair and flesh had been burned away, leaving only the white bone of her skull. An incubus, balancing on the T-shaped end of the spike, violated Ishtar’s ass with as much vigor as it could muster. A line of others stood behind it, entertaining one another as they waited their turns.
    One of them sniffed the air, then another, and another. Soon every demon in the room had stopped what they were doing and were searching the room for them.
    “Demons have to have noses like dogs,” said Persephone. “Who the fuck’s idea was that?”
    Nyx looked at the horde of demons beneath them, then peered above them. Thousands more demons were pouring down the stairs, all sniffing the air. “Well, this sucks.”
    “Yep,” agreed Persephone. “Now what?”
    “They can’t see us or notice us,” said Nyx. “They