Fearful Day: Voices of Hell Prequel Read online

  I open my mouth to ask him to let me go. As my lips part, he dips his head and his lips touched mine. Do not be mistaken, it is no passionate kiss or simple seduction. He breathes into me, and the darkness fills me once again. Just as it had on the first night he’d come to me, the deep onslaught of ebony pain rips and tears through my body. My mind goes blank, unable to form thoughts in the deep the abyss.

  Just as quickly as it starts, the pain ends. I feel lighter, less weighed down by the burden I have borne for so many years. The screams of the dying no longer sound hateful and wicked. They sing like heavenly voices calling through the din. He takes me by the arm and leads me away. I feel no regret, no fear. I walk beside him as if I have always longed to be at his side.

  Looking back on the room where I have spent a decade of my life tormented and filled with hate, I wish to remember it in passing. To my surprise, I see a girl. She stares at me with listless eyes, a familiar stranger lost in the forest of writhing shadows. She is free now. Free from all that would harm her, as I am free to seek out what the demon once promised. I was his crier, his siren, his vessel. I delivered the word. My saga was told, and now, a new story begins. Death and revenge will now be my calling.

  Sneak Preview of Voices of Hell

  Coming September 3, 2014

  Voices of Hell

  Chapter One

  Death wears a familiar face to comfort his victims. A mask resembling cherished loved ones fitted over his ghastly brow, so the dying might willingly take his hand and pass from this world in peace. It is this cruel twist that is the biggest injustice of all. He is charlatan, another one of the Universe’s lies. Trickery! Trickery, I say.

  Show your face, Death, you guiltless reaper of souls. Let the masses look upon the unrevealed existence of their end, do not sweeten the agony that you bring. Do not promise peace from turmoil whilst masquerading. I proudly wear those horrors on my countenance, which you wish to hide. I welcome such brutality with open arms. The life I lived was gilded in golden bars and chains—a prison for a home and a sanitarium for the mind. I wish to leave the people of this world in the same angry decay in which I existed.

  In the darkest moments, it has always been the lost ones who seek the light with a vengeance to rival all others. It is in desperate prayer and pleas that they reach out to a greater power, something beyond themselves. They seek a divine existence that possesses the power to free them from the bonds that tether their pathetic souls, the pain that eats away at their insides, and the deep abyss that threatens to swallow them up without a trace of who they once were. I once pleaded for such things.

  Do they find that solace? Is it for these poor souls that have tried to bargain, defend, and plead for their lives that the reaper appears in his facade? Is it their unwillingness to go gently into everlasting darkness without proof of an existence beyond the fragile human life they have lived, that brings about Death’s many faces?

  These are the people who should be shown the true visage of the creature that shall escort them into whatever lies beyond. I shall bestow upon them that fearful day, that hateful moment. They will hear the unspoken words that Hell sings and will know what is to come. The demons will dance in the firelight, the darkness will call from the shadows, and their screams for mercy will fall upon deafened ears.

  I am the bringer of death, the whisperer of destruction. I am the one who shall claim the lives of those who were too blind to see and too deaf to hear. Ashur’s calling is a simple one, and I am his vessel, his crier, his siren. I am the voice of Hell.

  These were the thoughts that ran through Iyzebel’s mind as she sat upon the edge of the skyscraper, looking down on the sleeping city. Fuming about her human past, she longed to abandon her perch and begin the culling that would rock all of humanity at its very core—if only Ashur would arrive.

  Sighing, she let the breeze carry her red hair out of the hood of her cloak in soft tendrils. Vain as it sounded, she had carefully chosen the image she would represent to those who would die at her hand. The reaper, clad in his dark assembles and carrying his sickle while wearing a familiar face, would envy her chosen wardrobe. The lady who walks in the night, draped in an ivory cloak and offering a dove white rose to those she claimed, would curl her nose up in disdain. However, Iyzebel gloried in her rebellion.

  Standing to leave, she let the long robe billow out around her naked body, baring her ample breast and voluptuous curves in the night air. A vision in red crushed velvet, with the moon reflecting on her ivory skin, she felt more like a Goddess than the halfling servant of a demon prince in Hell who couldn’t show up when he was supposed to.

  “Feeling a bit dramatic tonight, Izzy?” Ashur’s voice was coated in adoration for the woman before him.

  Turning toward the sound of his voice, a half-smile already curving her luscious red-painted lips, Iyzebel quipped, “What? No trumpets to announce your arrival? No white stallion with hooves that leave trails of fire? If I am dramatic, Ash, it’s because I learned my theatrics from you.”

  “Ah, the vengeance in your eyes burns as if they are made from heated sapphires! It makes me hungry. What were you thinking about just now?” Ash licked his lips as he leaped down from the outcropping he stood upon and landed at her side.

  Reaching, without thought, to brush away a smudge of dirt from his white suit coat, Izzy smiled. “I do love when you dress like an angel, Ash. Very suiting for all that long blond hair and chiseled good looks.”

  In response, he bowed at the waist and bent down from his incredible height to look her in the eye. “I’d forever be your angel, if you promise to wear that robe to my chamber tonight.”

  Giving him a playful shove, she laughed. “Okay, okay. Stop with all that. I’ve had enough fire and brimstone rolling around in poetic words through my head tonight. I swear hanging out with ancient beings is making me talk like you. I learned long ago just what caused you to fall from Heaven, Ash. Those lines won’t work on me. Where and when do we begin? Where are the generals? Where are the legions?”

  Ashur chuckled, his green eyes blazing, “Patience, my siren, has never been a virtue you possessed. We shall not wage our war tonight.”

  Her lips forming a natural pout, Izzy glared at him for a long moment. Craning her neck upward, so that she could take in his seven-foot of impossible beauty, she waited for an explanation. When none came, the fire in her veins exploded.

  “What the fuck? Five years I have waited and prepared for this. I have earned the right to bring these disgusting humans to their knees. Now, you want to wait some more.”

  The heat in Ash’s eyes was no longer playful humor when his voice boomed out over the rooftops, making more than a dozen pigeons fall dead to the street below. “You have waited? You! Don’t forget, Iyzebel, five years ago you were still one of those pathetic earthbound souls. It was I who freed you, and I who laid out this plan. Those fleshy insects played their part in my fall, and I will have my revenge. But only when I am ready.”

  She let the challenge stand in her eyes for a heartbeat after he finished, before dropping her gaze to the ground. “Yes, Prince Ashur.” The emphasis on his title made it clear that she was displeased, but her deference was complete.

  Hooking his finger under her chin and turning her face up to meet his gaze, he softened his tone, “Don’t fret, dear. I know you are disappointed, but I have learned of something that might hinder our plans. Once this nuisance has been dealt with, you shall have your culling. However, I have a special mission for you, which I think you will enjoy.” Eyeing her for a moment, he added, “But it might require a wardrobe change.”

  With a wicked grin, Izzy traced a hand down the edge of her open robe, “Too sinful?”

  Chuckling at her quick change of attitude, Ash took her by the hand and they disappeared into the night.

  Three floors down, in a small apartment to the rear of the building, Raf shivered. His bronzed skin puckered in the coldness that suddenly brushed across the back of his n
eck. His grandmother would have said someone walked across his grave, but even that dreary image could not compare with the sense of foreboding that tugged at the back of his mind.

  Hand held in mid-stroke, he stared at the little red farm house nestled amidst a field of flowers that he had been painting. Moments before, he had been mindlessly adding brilliant colors and sunny spots to the image, perfecting the glowing peace conveyed on the canvas. In an instant, the color seemed too bright, the cheery flowers bending in the breeze too soft. In a fury, he sat the painting aside. Already stirring his brushes and grabbing up a pallet of darker colors, his mind ran wild with the vision that danced before his eyes.

  The red for her hair must be dark, not like dried blood, but close. The crimson of her lips should be so bright that they beg to be kissed—if only to smudge the flawlessness in which they are painted. The blue, it must be deep and have a touch of glimmer. The flesh tones must be pale, the color of one who has never seen the sun. Surround her in darkness, so that she is the light. Yes, she is an ethereal light, my beauty.

  He mixed and blended, perfecting each tone before carefully and quickly bringing to life his visualization. Hours passed in his madness, until the sky lightened with the first vestiges of morning. Finally, with his hand cramped and burning, he fell to the floor in an exhausted heap and removed the ear buds from his ears. The music fell silent and the sound of his heart pounding took its place. As Raf gazed upon the stranger’s face he had replicated with pigment and passion, tears shined in his caramel eyes.

  The phone rang somewhere on the other side of the apartment, a million miles away. He was with her, the woman with the fire in her cold blue eyes, and nothing else mattered. He heard the voice through the machine, but he was too tired to focus.

  “Raf, its Marty. Put down the paint brush for a minute, I have some good news,” the voice of his agent came through the fog of fatigue. After a pause, the man continued, “I’ve got you a showing. Private collector with old world money, man. Pick up the phone, or call me back. Saturday night at nine o’clock with a midnight unveiling. I’m sending over someone to pick up all your new work tomorrow. This is it buddy, this is the one we’ve been waiting for. Call me, okay.”

  Raf did not move, instead, he idly thought over the words that filtered slowly through his brain. A show. The first in a long time. Well, since Shelia left. Shelia, what a faded memory that is. Doesn’t matter. Only the canvas matters. Only the face of this new beauty matters.

  Brushing away the memories of the girl who had broken his heart, Raf studied the painting in a drowsy state. Somehow, he knew the woman that seemed to glare back at him would be part of his destiny—even if he didn’t know how.

  With paint smeared on his brow and speckled up his arms, Raf fell into a deep and merciful sleep. He whispered a name forgotten before it fully left his lips into the first rays of the sun, “Iyzebel.”