Chapter 20: Dante - Where Light Cannot Follow

The world is dark. Not metaphorically, but literally dark. The path ahead is swallowed by shadow so thick it feels solid.

Though perhaps the metaphor holds, too. Maybe darkness is what I spent my life running from.

Now I'm walking toward it, chin raised, back straight. The same way I walked into any difficult negotiation. But this is no performance. No posturing.

It's for Virgil.

I understand the choice I'm making. I could walk back onto the path and make it through to this "ascension" he claims holds so much value. But I've never been a man seeking heaven. I'm not sure what I was actually seeking. Security, perhaps. Or maybe I've always been running from the shadows, trying to craft my own sun so I never feel cold again.

Now I walk into the greatest insecurity I've ever known, willingly moving into the dark, toward hell, and all for the sake of a single man.

Virgil moves closer beside me, almost unconsciously. I make no comment and don't move any nearer. He seems on the verge of bolting already. I'm not going to push it.

His appearance has changed—his curls a touch more mussed, his shoes marred with dark streaks, his sweater rumpled at the hem.

It makes him more appealing, somehow. That initial impression I had of him, that he was a retired model just past his prime, strikes me again. Except I was mistaken to think he was past some optimal point. Even in the darkness, I can make out the ringlet on his forehead, the way he holds himself, like posture costs him nothing. He's golden where everything else is ash.

I shouldn't notice these things. I notice them anyway.

He thinks he makes no impact because he cannot physically interact with anything. As much as I wished I could have placed my hand upon his and felt it, truly felt it, that's not what matters.

I don't walk through the shadows for Virgil, the beautiful poet, the classical ghost with sad eyes.

I walk for Virgil the soul.

A soul that breaks for a woman who'd rather blame anyone than face herself. A soul that spends eternity guiding the ungrateful through hell. A soul that weeps over another's pain as though it were his own.

I spent my life turning away from people like him.

Now that's what I'm walking toward. What I'm fighting for.

"Explain to me how it works," I whisper. I don't understand the rules here, but I understand now that there are rules. One being that saying certain names aloud, regardless of my skepticism, carries consequences. Virgil's physical flinching whenever that name is spoken was loud enough. "The feeding, I mean. How does it work for demons?”

Virgil looks away for a moment, then turns back and guides us toward a path branching away from the deepest darkness. He doesn't have to speak for me to understand. The shadows that fell, the hiss of the air. It’s a sign of some dark power approaching. One we don't wish to meet.

He clears his throat but keeps his voice low. The lyrical, musical quality of it sends a current through my spine. It surprises me how I react. Perhaps it's just the thought of nearly losing that voice that has me so attached to it.

"Demons can... we can... feed on souls' pain to regain sensory pleasure." He frowns at this but continues. "It's done by exploiting the deepest wounds of a soul, then fracturing them. Deepening them. It's not like a loop, which is painful but often cleansing. This compounds the pain, splinters it, and with nothing to set it back in place—like a bone that heals crooked—the soul often sets incorrectly. Damning them. Trapping them here forever if they are damaged enough. Or worse for others.”

The shadows are lifting slowly, giving way to ebony, then a midnight purple. "Is that what happened to Constance?"

Virgil shudders. "Yes. I... perhaps I shouldn't have left her. I thought she was stuck in her loop, unreachable." He swallows audibly in the eerie stillness. "She escaped at some point and was discovered by a group of demons. They fed on her. I heard her screams. I ran to her. I did, but I was... too late."

"God," I breathe, unable to form other words. Here I'd judged this woman as manipulative, weak, sinful—deserving of hell, if I'm honest with myself. Most of my contempt came from defensiveness on Virgil's behalf. But now I see her differently. As a victim. A survivor who became something else because of what was done to her.

I'm not sure what to do with that yet. It sits there, heavy and undigested.

"I fed, too." Virgil says this with his eyes unblinking, staring straight ahead. It's lightened enough that I can make out the haunted expression in his gaze. "When I first arrived here."

Shame is a shackle on him, a coat buckled with iron chains. I don't need to address it directly. "So when a demon feeds, they can touch again?"

"Yes. And taste. And smell. And... other things. Things they grow very hungry for. Things they will exploit others to obtain. Without feeding on others’ experiences, they lose those senses entirely." He stops walking. "You should go, Dante. This path is dangerous. If you remain beside me, you face this exploitation. I need to disappear for a few decades, until I'm forgotten again. Then I can resume guiding."

"You don't think you're worth saving, do you?"

Virgil's face lifts at this, and all the heaviness of his expression washes away. Instead, he looks as bright and startled as a child.

"I am beyond saving."

"I don't believe that," I say.

"You continue on this path, you will pay for that belief with your own pain." There is no emotion in his voice. Just certainty.

I match his tone. "I've made up my mind. Sometimes you face volatile markets, declining sectors, and hostile conditions. But you identify a position worth taking, and you commit, for good or ill. I've found my position, Virgil." I raise my hand, palm up, offering. "I'm willing to hold it."

He stares at my palm like I'm offering a golden apple rather than an empty hand. He leans forward. I hold my breath. Waiting for his hand to hover above mine, untouching but felt regardless.

A scream tears my attention away.

Of course, I think. Of course, something interrupts.

The sound is so wretched and guttural that it makes the drowning souls in the swamps sound like a choir practice.

"Please," the woman begs, the word wet with desperation. "Please, please, don't."

Virgil steps alongside me and looks down the path ahead. "We should go a different direction."

But I can't tear myself away from the sobs. It's an adult making the sound, judging by the tenor of her voice, but she cries like someone being unmade piece by piece.

"Dante." Virgil's voice is firm. A command. "A demon is feeding. We must go."

The woman cries out again—a shriek of absolute helplessness, the terror of watching something precious destroyed while paralyzed, the pain of a hundred lifetimes ripped open and waded through.

"No," I say. "We can't walk away. That’s what I spent my entire life doing.”

"Dante." Virgil's whisper is urgent now. "You are still... you radiate with your own pain." He says this carefully, as though he doesn't want to wound me further. But I'm somehow beyond that consideration. "If you go down there, the demon will choose you next."

The woman wails again—the kind of sound that starts in the stomach, in the soul, and tears its way out.

I hesitate for only a moment before I run down the path.

Two figures stand in the crook of a corner, tucked against an ancient tree, further in the shadows. One—the screaming one—has pressed her hands over her ears. Tears glisten on her face and shimmer across her broad features. Her teeth are white, the only brightness in the scene. And she wails and weeps and begs like a woman watching her own execution in slow motion.

The other figure looms over her. His muscular arm flexes as he draws a single finger up the woman’s neck.

She gasps.

The sound that leaves her throat deepens, the grief in it swelling as though something inside her has been split open and pulled to the surface.

His eyes blaze against olive skin, and the smile he wears is crooked, intoxicated.

He drinks it in.

The woman’s sobs grow sharper, rawer. Each tremor of anguish seems to feed the light in his eyes.

He whispers something to her, but I can't make it out.

Without thinking, I barrel into both of them. It almost surprises me how substantial they both are, how much physical impact there is. I end up sprawled over the whimpering soul. She curls into herself, the motion pushing me aside.

I gasp as the demon grabs me by my sweater, the fabric twisting at my throat as he yanks me back. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

He emphasizes this by shifting his grip, wrapping those strong fingers around my throat. My fingers fly to my neck. My breath is cut off. My pulse is⁠—

Nonexistent.

And my breath? Unneeded.

This only exists because I believe it.

"Dante," I spit. "That's who I am."

The demon's eyes widen, his nostrils flaring. He gives me a shake, and despite knowing logically this isn't real, my teeth still clack in my jaw, my joints still ache.

Then he stops. And smiles at me.

I kick him, and he grunts, surprised, perhaps by my strength. Perhaps by my conviction of it. I'm not certain how anything works here, truly.

"Oh, I'm going to enjoy watching you suffer," he hisses, then rubs his thumb across my lips, parting them, moving slowly. I snap forward to bite, but he only chuckles.

"Malrec." Virgil's voice thunders.

The demon turns toward him, then drops me to the ground.

"Virgil." The demon grins, even more maliciously than before. Beside me, the tortured woman emits a low moan. "I knew I recognized this one's particular flavor of pain. Acquired a pet, have we?" He spins back to me with predatory speed and has his hands back around my throat before I can move. "Wandered off the path, did we?"

Virgil shrugs, his face utterly composed. He seems nearly bored. His gaze drifts back the way we came, as though he's considering leaving. His eyes pass over me, and only in that brief moment do I see a spark of feeling so deep it could cut through hell's foundations. But I've misjudged this man. He's far better at concealing his emotions than I've ever been.

It strikes me hard that he's chosen to be readable to me. All this time.

Every flicker of emotion I thought I'd caught, every moment I believed I was seeing through his composure—he let me see. He welcomed me to see his truth.

"You know how tedious these souls can be," Virgil says in a dry, detached tone I've never heard from him before. "I’m enjoying my time with that one, though. He comes from a modern city. You remember how I find those fascinating."

Malrec scoffs. "You and your obsession with the mortal world."

Virgil only shrugs. "We all have our diversions."

"Yours aren't amusing at all." The hand tightens around my throat. I try to tell myself this isn't real. Hell isn't real. But my senses betray me. The clench around my windpipe feels as real as anything I've ever experienced.

"Well," Malrec purrs. "I can relieve you of him now."

"It would be wiser for you to go." Virgil glances back toward the shadows once more. His voice is slow, languid, and unconcerned with what happens here. "He approaches. And you've gone too far with this one." Virgil nods toward the crumpled woman. “I need not say how our master disdains excess."

Malrec licks his lips. "I haven't broken her yet."

"You've destabilized her. You know he abhors that. Breaks can create cracks. But take my counsel or not. I, for one, intend to be elsewhere when he arrives to survey this." Another dismissive glance at the ruined soul.

Malrec wrinkles his nose and looks me straight in the face. Then he takes his tongue and traces it up my jaw. I jerk away from the violation, the loss of control, the disgust—but then freeze as something else hits me.

Pain.

Pain so brutal I cry out without any ability to hold it back.

I am six years old and my father's belt cracks against my back, welts rising where thick leather falls again and again while I bite through my lip to keep from screaming. I am nine, and my ribs show through my skin, and I'm so hungry I can't remember what it feels like not to be. I am nineteen and in a dorm room with a boy I thought I wanted, finally allowing myself to want at all, but his hands are too rough, his mouth too greedy, and when I try to slow him down, he doesn't listen. He pushes past my hesitation like it's nothing, like I'm nothing, and I let him because I need this to be more than it is. Afterward, he falls asleep, and I sit on the edge of his bed, cataloging the bruises on my hips, the ache in my body.

I am twenty-eight and watching Matthew's face crumple as I tell him I don't love him. Watching myself destroy something precious and doing it anyway. Choosing to do it. That's the worst part—the choice.

I am every age at once, every wound reopened. Hopeless. Tormented. Burning. I think I'm actually on fire, my body doused in oil and set alight. I thrash. I scream. And it's no use. I continue to burn, to suffer, to feel every shame and loss and moment of aloneness I've ever buried. Every harm I've suffered and every harm I've caused. It all surfaces at once, a flood with no banks to contain it.

The pain stops as suddenly as it began.

Malrec smiles at me, then kisses me firmly on the mouth. I'm so frozen from the torment that I can't even turn my head away.

"Just needed a taste of you before I depart," he murmurs against my lips.

He drops me, and I have no ability to catch myself. I land against rocks that bruise my ribs, let my face fall against the ground with a dull thud. I see the woman shuddering beside me and try to focus on my breath. On any physical sensation that’s grounding. That reminds me I'm here. Not in the fire, not in the abuse, not in the cold room where I broke a man’s heart.

With a groan, I rise onto an elbow just as Malrec chuckles, nods to Virgil, and disappears around the bend.

Virgil is beside me at once, his careful mask gone, his eyes welling with tears. "How badly are you hurt?"

I groan but manage a smile. "Not at all. If you'll...” Another groan. “…remember, hell isn't real. This is all…” A whimper. “…in my head." I pause to breathe. "But on that note, damn my imagination."

Virgil starts sobbing. His hands hover over me, desperate to help me up, to comfort me, but knowing he cannot. And even though it takes more muscle control than I currently possess, I reach up and hover my hand just above his shoulder.

"I am okay."

"You are a fool," Virgil whispers. But he reaches out in kind, brushes his ghostly hand over my shoulder.

The woman shudders violently. I roll over, trying to get closer to her. Her trembling intensifies, and her form begins to separate, blinking in and out, pieces of her image spilling away like ink dropped in water.

"What—" I gasp. The pain is still settling in me, the lingering fire slowly cooling.

“She’s become destabilized." Virgil shakes his head. "Can you walk? We need to distance ourselves before she breaks."

"Breaks?"

“Her soul comes apart, Dante." Virgil says this with such sorrow that it seems to pool around us.

The woman explodes. Her image tears away like ripples from a stone dropped in still water—expanding, fragmenting, dissolving. Then she’s gone. The space where she'd been is empty.

"He will have felt that," Virgil says, his voice nearly hollow. "I know you're hurting, but you must rise now, Dante. We have to move."

I nod and, painstakingly, get to my feet. The world tilts, then steadies.

My body aches with phantom wounds. My mind still echoes with fire and belt-leather and hands I couldn't escape. I can still feel Malrec's tongue on my jaw, his lips on my mouth, violations I'll carry whether I want to or not. And beneath all of it, Matthew's face. The way it crumpled. The way I made it crumple.

I look at the empty ground where a soul had been only moments ago. Then I look at Virgil, at the tears still wet on his face, at the hands that reached for me even though they couldn't hold.

"Lead the way," I say.

He turns toward a corner of the darkness. I watch his back for a moment, the slight hunch of his shoulders, the way he moves like he's carrying something heavier than himself.

I'm not letting him carry it alone.

Not anymore.

I follow.