Page 32 of Can you take it?

“Fine!” she snapped back.

Suddenly a creak sounded in the space that drew all of our attention to a tiny sliver of yellow light shining through a crack in the wall.

One of the doors had opened.

The small amount of light let me see everyone in the room’s features more clearly. Walter’s face looked stern and lethal for the first time that I’d seen. Eletha looked completely perplexed. I turned in time to see Anna watching me before she quickly looked away. Liar. I wanted to stay as far away as possible from her. I didn’t need any more women from that family using me.

“Hello? Who’s there?” Bexley made it to the door first, leaving only his dirt-covered hand on the handle in our view. “Who goes here?” he said louder as he took another step out the door and began to close it behind him.

“Don’t close the door!” we all shouted in unison as we rushed to grab the handle.

I grabbed the door to stop it from closing, and yanked it open, revealing a creepy, silent forest.

“Look,” Anna said, poking her head around my side. “There he is.”

Sure enough, Bexley’s silhouette was stumbling up the dirt path that led into the woods, where it grew darker than the room we had just been in. Even in my selfish mood, I wasn’t going to let the poor drunk stumble into something awful alone.

I turned my head and glanced at Walter with a soft nod. He pushed his way past Eletha and followed me through the door. With another conspiratorial look, I slammed the door shut while Walter looked for something to block it with.

Chapter 10

ELI

TIER TWO: WRATH

Admit, even in my state of unfamiliar self-interest, it hadn’t felt good to leave the girls behind. I will also admit that the niggling feeling had not impeded Walter or me from putting our best efforts into barring the door and keeping the girls on the other side. It felt imperative. I didn’t want Anna getting in my head any more than she already had, and if I had to hear Walter and Eletha bicker anymore, I was going to lose it. So it seemed now that it was the girls against the guys in the race to the tenth tier.

Walter and I picked up the pace, moving away from the barred door on the side of a rock wall as fast as our legs could carry us. How Bexley managed to gain so much distance between us in that short amount of time, I’ll never know. I didn’t know much about the man, but what I did know was that he stumbled a lot, which in my experience had proven to be hazardous when trying to speedily get away. I didn’t actually think Bexley was trying to get away from us, though I don’t really think he knew what he was doing—when he fell through the door or now for that matter. My guess was he hadn’t even realized he was in the tiers yet.

“Where did he go?” said Walter. We had somehow turned our walk into an outright run. I began to feel less bad about leaving the girls, as we got deeper and deeper into the forest. It was dark and ominous, but that wasn’t what set this creepy forest apart from the others. I wanted to question Walter, to see if he felt as though he was at home in Unseelie, in a place like this, but one glance at him showed he was as guarded as me.

The air was dark and thick, not exactly smoggy but certainly not clear. The trees looked old, with black bark and long branches bent at odd angles. Odd sounds echoed around us. The only green in the forest seemed to be a few patches of dark moss that lined the ground and the bases of a few trees. It felt lifeless and without color. I thought about letting Walter know that it felt like something was watching us, but when I looked to tell him, he gently shook his head, as if he already knew what I was going to say and didn’t think we should speak out loud.

We still had yet to find Bexley and had cleared a fair bit of the path. Confused, the two of us slowed to a walk. The exercise had felt good and the momentum forward even better, but with every winding turn in this forest, I felt more eyes on us and the need to slow down and observe our surroundings took over.

“Where do you think he could’ve gone?” I asked Walter. “He probably veered off the path and got lost in the forest.

“Should we go and find him?” Walter asked.

The old me wouldn’t have hesitated—a fellow man in need sent a surge through my bones and my body that lit me up with excitement. But that was before. “What do you know about this Bexley guy?” I asked instead. I was wary of wasting more energy on someone who didn’t deserve it, even though I was in no position to decide who deserved it.

“He’s been in Tartarus for as long as I can remember. I even remember Kaohs mentioning him to Mendax once or twice and that was centuries ago.”

“Bexley’s been in Tartarus for centuries?” I scowled. It surprised me to hear that somebody that slept like a bum on the floor under tattered rags had been there for centuries. I would have guessed someone who had been around that long would have been respected and admired—and in a much higher social position than he was.

Interpreting my look, Walter shrugged. “I don’t really know his story, but there are rumors that he was the Devil’s son, you know the keeper of hell, which I guess is like the humans’ Tartarus.” He shrugged again.

I was familiar with the concept of heaven and hell from the human realm. I had spent enough time with Cal to know most of the human lore. “If that were true, then wouldn’t he be revered amongst Kaohs and the others, instead of being kicked and screamed at all the time? I’ve never been to the humans’ Hell, but Bexley doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy that could be the spawn of Satan. He seems harmless.”

Walter tipped his chin down, giving me a smug look. “Did Cal look like she spent every waking second of her time plotting the demise of your kingdom and family? Did your mother look like she was capable of killing your dad? Or Anna, or me?” “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s leave mothers out of this. But I get your point.” The last thing I wanted to do right now was to discuss my mother with Walter. She was the reason he was here and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been waiting for him to lash out at me because of it. In fact, even just in our makeshift group, my mother was responsible for nearly half their deaths. “Should we go into this forest and find this guy or not?” I asked him. At a rustling in the woods next to us, my head snapped to the side. “We are being followed.”

“There’s no way the girls have gotten out yet,” said Walter. “It took me five minutes to move those boulders in front of the door.”

“It’s not the girls,” I muttered.

“Yeah, I heard that too,” Walter replied when another rustle of dead leaves sounded.

“What sin is Tier Two? I can’t remember,” I asked. “Wrath,” he stated.