because we all carried some openly. Azazel had two swords strapped to his back, Mammon sported daggers in sheaths on his thighs, Azmodea had what looked like miniature crossbows fastened to her arms, and even I was allowed a weapon—the dagger Azazel had gifted me dangled from a decorative, thin belt at my waist.
I’d been visibly puzzled why Lucifer would permit the festival guests to come armed, thinking of the tight security an event like this would entail in most human societies. Demon mentality, it seemed, worked a bit different. According to Azazel, if Lucifer required visitors to come unarmed, it would be a sign of weakness on his part. As if he believed he wouldn’t be able to fight off an attack, either by his own power alone, or with the help of his loyal guard.
Apparently, such an attack happened every so often, the Fall Festival being a notorious opportunity for it, and each time Lucifer squashed the uprising with brutal efficiency. From Azazel and Azmodea’s accounts, it sounded like he took great pleasure in it too.
With that thought at the forefront of my mind, I followed Azazel and the others into the entrance hall. Each step took me further into Lucifer’s home, our upcoming meeting looming ahead of us like a storm front. My heart thundered in my chest, nerves making me jittery. I tried to slow my breathing and focused on my surroundings.
The huge entrance hall stretched out for what seemed like hundreds of yards, the high ceiling held up by pillars that rose out of the landscape of pools and fountains. When Mephistopheles mentioned Lucifer had a water garden of preposterous proportions, he hadn’t been kidding. This wasn’t just a garden, it was a water park.
Reflecting pools hewn from marble, waterfalls tumbling over jeweled rock formations, water spouting from exquisitely carved fountains in a mix of natural-seeming shapes and sophisticated architecture that should have looked incongruous but somehow made beautiful sense. Dozens of paths diverged from the main walkway.
Whoever wanted an audience with Lucifer had to come through this ostentatious show of wealth in Hell’s arid climate.
But the symbolism didn’t end there.
Where the water garden impressed with beauty and elegance and the explicit message of riches and resources, the hallway beyond served to cow and subjugate.
It took me a moment to realize the extent of it, because at first my gaze was inexorably drawn to the wings on the walls. I suffered a momentary flashback to Azazel’s own collection in his entrance hall, but if that one made my hindbrain wake up and take the wheel, Lucifer’s macabre menagerie of severed wings caused my entire brain to crash with screeching tires.
The hallway was as wide as Azazel’s entrance hall, its walls as high, only it stretched on and on ahead of us, and along the entire length—and up toward the ceiling—wings plastered the walls in such tight formation that the stone behind them wasn’t visible anymore. A gruesome, feathered wallpaper.
Movement on the floor made me tear my gaze away from the proof of the hundreds—thousands?—of foes Lucifer vanquished.
“Don’t look down,” Azazel murmured and reached out to lift my chin as I dipped my head.
Too late.
My steps faltered. Nausea exploded in my stomach. “Are those—”
Azazel laid a hand on my lower back, gently urged me onward. “Just block it out.”
Bile rose up to my throat. “But—what—”
“The most egregious offenses against his rule, Lucifer punishes with imprisonment here.”
“In the floor?” I squeaked.
“So all who wish to speak with him are reminded of the consequences of crossing him.”
As far as psychologically targeted cruelty went, this was impressive, if nauseating. The ones being punished had to watch, helplessly and in pain, as visitors walked along right over them, and the ones seeking audience with Lucifer got a vivid impression of why they should behave when they faced the lord of Hell.
“But—” I hyperventilated, flailed toward the ground without looking down again. “The rats?”
I covered my mouth with my hand, barely keeping the contents of my stomach from decorating the floor.
The glass floor, directly underneath which one demon after another lay chained to a subfloor—alive—to be snacked on by rodents vaguely reminiscent of rats. At least the glass was thick enough to muffle the screams.
“We are immortal, and many of us are jaded by time and near invincibility,” he said, the soothing tone of his voice at odds with his words. “For punishment to be effective, it has to be brutal and merciless. You know the Greek myth of Prometheus having