Page 79 of Into the Abyss
On the structure, a demon having sex withthree other males was revealed. The jinn watched for a minutebefore this scene faded away and a new one replaced it. And then, Iunderstood how the jinn found us earlier.
The monolith was the equivalent of thehumans’ TVs. It showed one channel at a time, but the jinn couldflicker through the different channels until they found somethingthey wanted to watch. Through Absenthees, they watched differentwishes unfolding, but they could only see one at a time, and thejinn would focus on the ones heading toward their tragicconclusion. They must have accidentally flipped to us with Danawhile searching for something better to watch.
I examined the pit while I tried to decidewhat to do next. With the height of the walls and their rockyformations, climbing in or out of the crater without making somenoise or knocking rocks free would be impossible.
The angles of some of the walls would makedescending nearly impossible as in certain areas they curved inuntil some of them would have us hanging upside down. The placewould be impenetrable if there were still two or three jinn at theend of this path, but we could slip by one.
I suspected the resurrection of the faeworld Amalia created by the pool had caught someone’s attention anddrawn away the other jinn guarding this path. We’d somehow missedthe jinn searching for us, or they’d tried to find us by stalkingus from above.
No matter what they’d decided to do, or howthey’d done it, they would be back, and we had to be out of herebefore they returned. Movement from the pit drew my attention backto Absenthees as, from around the corner of it, three of the tenremaining horsemen rode their mounts into view.
There are horsemen here!
It was a complication I hadn’t seen comingbut should have. I knew they were all in league with each other,and the horsemen would enjoy playing in the Abyss almost as much asthe jinn.
At least the jinn hadn’t invited any of thefallen angels to the party, or at least I didn’t see any of themhere.
Briefly, I searched the sky, but when I sawnothing there, I turned my attention back to the horsemen. If anyof the fallen were here, they would have started hunting us fromthe sky long ago. Cloaking illusion or not, those pricks wouldscour the land ceaselessly until they found us.
My attention returned to the horsemen. Inthe center of the three, Lust sat proudly on her horse with herlush body on full display. Her white hair spilled over the ass endof her gray horse.
I recognized Pride by the way he carriedhimself. Like Lust, he sat bareback on his smoky, purple-grayhorse. Out of all the horses, Pride’s was the most beautiful withits thick, curved neck and its black forelock brushing against itsnose. The horse’s black mane and tail touched the ground, and itseyes were the neon color of lavender.
Pride’s broad shoulders were thrust back ashe sat taller on his mount than the horsemen with him. His blackhair was brushed back from the planes of his angular face to revealeyes the same color as his horse’s. Not one speck of dirt orwrinkle marred him or his clothing from his black pants and shirtto the royal purple cloak he wore. An almond-shaped broach with asingle, unblinking purple eye gazing out from its center claspedthe cloak together.
Next to Pride, Sloth’s pudgy frame slouchedon the back of his horse. His legs barely wrapped around thehorse’s thick belly. The mane and tail of his brown horse werematted, and its forelock was a tangled knot between its ears. Thehorse had one lazy blue eye drifting toward the right and one lazybrown eye falling to the left.
Some of Sloth’s tousled brown hair stood onend, and the rest of it draped across his round, florid face. Slothpersonified laziness, yet the intelligence in his pale blue eyesdidn’t match his apathetic persona.
Amalia gave a subtle tug on my hand. When Iturned to her, her red eyes burned with fury, but she’d paledvisibly. “They brought the horsemen here,” she mouthed.
And if the growing pallor of her skin wasany indication, the putrid emotions the horsemen emitted wasbattering her newly escalated empath ability. I had to get her outof here.
“Focus on me,”I mouthed back.
Her jaw set before she pointed a finger atthe horsemen.“They shouldnotbe here. We can’t allowthem to remain.”
Then I realized the horsemen weren’t justescalating her empath ability and fueling her anger; she wasenragedat the jinn for bringing the horsemen into theAbyss.
Squeezing her hand, I turned my attentionback to those gathered before us. We would have to return to theothers and bring them here if we were going to fight the jinn andthe horsemen. We couldn’t face them with only the two of us.
A step drew my attention to the path behindus, and I froze. Coming toward us were three more jinn who wouldwalk directly into us in less than ten feet.
Tugging on her hand, I turned sideways toslip past the jinni at the end of the path, and Amalia followedsilently behind me. We hugged the steep walls until we neared thejinn guarding the end of the next pathway. Edging further into themiddle of the pit, we stayed far away from the jinn to avoidcausing a shift in air current and possibly alerting them to ourpresence.
I had to get her out of this pit andsomewhere she could open a portal out of here. No one could see us,but I wouldn’t be able to cloak the disturbance in the air shecreated with the opening.
Coming around the back of the monolith, Ispotted a set of ruins sitting on top of the wall. Judging by theremains, the crumbling, sandstone structure once spanned hundredsof feet in length. Most of what remained was only a few feet high,some of it was a single story, and in other sections, it was two.One area of the ruins stood three stories high.
The three-story section was mostly untouchedand showed no sign it might collapse anytime soon, but the segmentnext to it was nothing more than a few feet of wall. A single towerstood beside that ruined section, and I suspected there were oncemore towers, but time ate all but the one.
If we could make it up there, we could finda place for Amalia to take us from here.
Her hand trembled in mine, and I felt aweakening in her. Turning, my breath caught when her eyes met mine;they were a sickly mustard hue I’d never seen before. Her skin wasso pale her freckles stood out starkly.
Is this from the horsemen, or is somethingmore at work here?
I went to scoop her into my arms, but sheedged away from me. My teeth ground together when I stepped closerto her again; she avoided me.
