Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory #2) - Lauren Gilley Page 0,80
next few days throwing herself at the treadmill and various training dummies – and at the problem at hand. Bedlam had been in constant contact with the higher-ups, and there was lots of noise about needing to ramp up the war effort. They needed new weapons, new tech, new armor, new troops, new ideas.
One came to Rose one evening on the treadmill, and she nearly fell off.
Several attempts had been made over the last few years to capture and interrogate a hell beast conduit. It had never ended well, and nothing had been learned. Heavenly conduits saw humans as beneath notice, but weren’t shy about sharing their plans for humanity: namely, extermination. But Beck had always thought that hell was the key – his pet hell theory, as Kay had called it. They needed angels fighting demons, instead of people, and she’d always had the impression he thought hell was, somehow, more easily understood.
Humans were no strangers to sin, after all.
What they needed was a window to hell. An informant. Someone who could prove to be an ally. But where would that lead? Not all demons were created equal; how could they choose a likely, and reliable hell ally?
She did know one person in hell.
It hit her like a slap. Or like a truck.
She managed to switch the treadmill off with shaking fingers, stagger off of it, and go sit down against the wall, all but falling the last few inches. She pressed her face into her hands, heedless of the Knight from Blue Company asking if she was alright.
She’d joined the military with the intent of using it. She’d not come to it like a lamb to slaughter; she’d not been aimless, and searching for an outlet. The military had what she hadn’t, then: resources. Resources she could use to figure out how to go down to hell and fetch Beck. A fire that had burned in her for months and months…until she’d banked it. Until the missions had become too dangerous and time-consuming to be brushed off as inconveniences to her research. She’d thrown herself at her work, because she’d had to – and then she’d been so good at it that it had started to become a kind of outlet for her grief and rage. She’d been swept up in a tide of busyness; the Companies’ goals of stemming the war had become her own.
And then she’d gotten swept up in Lance.
She felt sick and dizzy, as she stared down at the rubber mat between her sneakers, heart squeezing. When she thought of Beck now, it was with an ache, and a clench, and a grief mellowed by time and new experience. But she’d lost the fervor of trying to find him.
She’d all but abandoned him. While she fought monsters, and worked alongside a conduit, and fucked another man.
When she could, she stood, and walked straight to the library – a sad name for the concrete-walled space with the harsh lights; where metal shelves held some books, but mostly files, and metal tables offered uninviting places to sit and pore over them. A few computers sat along a bank on the far wall, and that was where she went.
Between possibly illegal searches on conjuring spells, pentagrams, and hell portals, she was slapped full in the face with a memory: Beck’s warm and woodsy library, a fire crackling in the hearth, ink-scented books spread out before her.
King Arthur. His knights. His legacy. His saints.
She sucked in a breath, and typed Saint Derfel into the search bar.
She spent three days researching, and then she took her findings to Captain Bedlam.
Who arched a single brow and sat back in her chair, absently clicking the top on a pen with a raised hand. “A saint? In Wales? King Arthur?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” Rose said, hyper-aware of Lance’s gaze pinned sharply to the side of her face. She ignored him. “But it’s something he told me about before the Second Rift – a theory that he, and others, had even then. And according to what I discovered in the chat rooms–”
“You want me to send you to Wales based on what you found in chat rooms?”
“No, ma’am,” she said, undeterred, chin lifting to a stubborn angle. “I want you to send me to Wales because there aren’t any other immediate options for advancing this war, and because, chat rooms or not, this is the first new idea anyone’s brought you.”
Her look plainly said watch it. “Why Becket? He wasn’t military. In