Chapter 7: I Got Down on my Knees, and I Pretend to Pray
Skyler and Ashley had secreted themselves into another unoccupied hotel room at the top of some spire in some metropolis... somewhere. They had done what they always did when left alone with a bed, with the new addition of Skyler's own extension. Her 'front tail,' as she sometimes called it. Ashley was not convinced that Skyler had suddenly discovered euphemisms, and would gladly let her call it a cock.
The pair made great use of the unused bed, tangling up together and fucking to the point of exhaustion. They were both surprised they had a limit that they could reach.
Skyler was spread across Ashley's chest like a blanket, only moving when Ashley lifted and lowered her with her deep breathing.
"How are you feeling?" Skyler said softly.
"I feel great." Ashley whispered back. "That... was so good."
"Yeah, it is. This partnership has worked out amazing so far." Skyler smiled. "I think we should all team up an angel with a devil."
"There's not enough angels." Ashley said. "We're outnumbered like a million to one."
"Tyranny of the minority." Skyler said. "That's fine, we'll just have to team up many devils for each angel. You're open-minded to group sex, right?"
Ashley whimpered. "I sort of hope you're joking..."
"I am."
"Yeah, the desire for monogamy is still pretty strong... I won't tell you not to mess around if you like, but if you had a demon friend you wanted to bring along, I guess..."
Skyler said. "You really don't know how bad it is down there, huh? There are no such thing as 'demon friends.' Just cellmates. Most will step on you if it'll make their boot smell better. Or worse. But there's no sense of community and there never will be. There will never be enough demons willing to cooperate to make a significant difference against the ones who just want to knock everything back down."
"It never seemed that bad, when I'd poke my head down there..." Ashley confessed. "But then again, I wasn't stuck there. It was just like passing through a bad town, rather than living in it."
"Have you ever gotten to know someone from the pit before you met me?" Skyler asked. "And I don't mean 'know' in the classical sense, I mean really got to know them."
Ashley grew still. "Only once..."
Skyler noticed her change in demeanor. "Wow, she must've been bad, if that's how you think of her."
"It's... not a fun story."
Skyler leaned on Ashley's shoulder. "Tell me."
Ashley looked over. "I can show you."
They stood up. Ashley put her arms around Skyler. Skyler hummed as she put her head on her shoulder. It was amazing how different she felt about being in the grasp of an angel. With a thought, Ashley opened a portal in the floor, connecting them to some other room. Ashley let them drift gently through the floor and out the ceiling of some other room.
The new room wasn't nearly as nice as the last one. Dim sunlight catching the dust and shimmering through broken blinds and tattered curtains. Cracked linoleum tiles faced mold-stained drop ceiling tiles in this empty square room with nothing in it but a plastic chair... and a stainless steel IV stand.
Skyler looked to her surroundings, to the disgusting, dusty floor she was standing on. "Oh, ew." She jumped into the air, a pair of sneakers appearing on her feet before she touched ground. "What is this, an abandoned hospital?"
"Wasn't quite abandoned when I was here, but yeah. This was a closed wing of a hospital that has now evidently completely shut down." Ashley pointed to the floor. Four oblong runnels were dug into the tile, evidently where a hospital bed had sat for a long time. It had covered the floor long enough to leave a ring of dirt around where the bed had stood, creating a nearly perfect negative impression. It didn't say much for this hospital's cleanliness, if a mop had not once passed through here while the bed was still there.
"What happened here?" Skyler asked.
"I was watching the surface, as I do. I was looking for... you know, demon behavior. I found something really, really strong. This kind of activity would normally inspire a huge response, but... nobody had found it and nothing in the immediate are was changing or warping. It looked entirely contained. So, I went down to check it out.
"But... I couldn't get in. Someone had created a time warp so strong that when I tried getting into it, it was like pushing into a brick wall. I probably would have dislocated something if I had tried to force it. Luckily, there was a movable partition wall that was inside the time warp, so I just put a portal on that and got in, rather than pushing through the edge."
"I don't mean to interrupt..." Skyler said. "But you're saying one of us made a time warp so strong and so slow that an ANGEL couldn't get in?"
"Not 'couldn't,' but she sure made it difficult." Ashley said. "She definitely wasn't thrilled to see me, grabbing me by the throat and holding a scalpel up to it. Not like that would have cut me, but I eventually got her to calm down. It was just me, her... and a patient in the bed. An older guy with a beard, balding, gaunt, hooked up to a bunch of machines. None of them seemed to be giving him any comfort. He was moaning and grunting through his breathing contraptions. He was shaking and struggling, but didn't have enough strength to even sit up or lift his head from his pillow."
"Who was he?"
"A local sheriff, and later a state senator. Nobody famous on the national level, and not someone we might notice when watching the entire world... but certainly not a person who had served with any degree of honor. Illegal immigrants dying of thirst in his custody, pregnant women miscarrying in holding cells, prejudice, rape, organized crime, suborning prosecutor malpractice and perjury, election interference... I don't remember it all. She regaled me with his long rap sheet. I wasn't yet in the market of taking the word of a demon, but I believed her. It felt like she was telling the truth.
"Somehow, this demon had learned what I have told you, how our realm isn't the afterlife of the surface-dwellers, and that it is not the realm of the Creator. Evidently, she found it unacceptable that this man might not be punished after his death... at least not by us.
"So if he would not be set to the pit and punished after his death... then she would take matters into her own hands."
"How?"
"She was clever. She'd somehow found a gap in how the time warp magic works." Ashley said. "Let's say you were terminally ill with whatever form of disease, and the doctor's knew you had exactly twenty-four hours to live. Life doesn't really work like that, but for the sake of argument... if you warped time and sat in your bubble to live out your last day, how long would you get?"
Skyler thought about it. "Well, I would think you'd only get the day as you experience it in slow-time, and then you would die, and your body would decompose at that rate? Maybe slower because maybe bacteria or whatever can't get to it as easily, like if you died in a walk-in freezer?"
"That's logical. In fact, if someone was poisoned IN a time warp with hemlock or something else that shuts down breathing muscles, I think that would kill someone in the slow time. But that's not how it works with death by natural causes." Ashley said. "If someone was fated to live a single more day, they get that entire day as measured in real time. Even if a demon finds you in a hospital, dying of metastasized liver cancer and suffering from mini-strokes and blood clots... and that demon decides that this day needs to last... longer."
Ashley stared at the space where the bed once stood, picturing it in her mind.
"A lot longer."
"How much longer?"
"I've never really been able to properly figure out how long, since we don't possess that skill. And I wasn't there when she started this infernal trap. But since I can consult you now... how hard would you have to try to make the time in a room this size proceed so slowly... that the molecules in the doorway stood as heavy as earth, as solid as a wall?
Skyler's eyes bugged a bit at the thought. "I doubt I could... I haven't even turned a second into a minute. It would have to be hundreds of times slower than real time. Maybe thousands."
"This might also be why there was so much... demonic energy present." Ashley said. "I picture it like writing too slowly with a quill and the ink just soaking into the paper. Time was moving so slowly that the window looked like night because the light was entering the room so slowly."
"Goddamn." Skyler mumbled, then remembered herself. "Oops, sorry."
"It's fine..." Ashley waved her hand down in a dismissive motion. "Anyway, I offered her a way out, the way I had let myself in. The machine she wished to create was set. She could have just let it run and observed it from outside, now that I was there to make an exit. But she would not take it. She didn't even want to watch him through the portal or the window. She insisted she had to make sure that his pain lasted as long as possible. I even offered to stay there and keep her company... not really knowing how much time I was offering, but that's immortality for you. She said that wasn't necessary, and didn't want anything to distract her from watching him.
"So... I excused myself from the room, and let it play out in real time. I quickly checked around to make sure that no humans would stumble on us, but the entire wing was not in use. For some of it, I just watched her sit there, flashing around like a time-lapse.
"What was hours for me... must have been literal years for her. Years of NOTHING but watching his agony. Hardly anyone who ever lived had suffered so much. I'm not even sure why I let it happen. If she was relishing in his misery, I probably would have pulled the plug. I have no patience for earnest sadism. But there was no glee in what she was doing, if there ever was any. No satisfaction. She didn't eat or drink, she didn't stand up or pace. She just sat there and watched like a teacher staying after school with the rascally student.
"Eventually, he stopped moving, and she sat there with her head down, so I went back in. The second we made eye contact, she started crying. She didn't say anything. She just grabbed me and sobbed. At first, I wasn't sure why. I thought maybe she just... didn't want to return to the pit. Maybe she had spent so long with him that she was just relieved that it was finally over. Whatever was happening, I just didn't want to send her to the pit after all that. It didn't seem right."
Ashley's hand vanished into a small portal. She took out a short, spiky dagger, almost like a long needle. It wasn't a weapon crafted to intimidate, only to do a job.
"So... I took this dagger and I stabbed her in the back. She took in a breath, never to let it out. She looked at me, and realized it was finally over. She relaxed, went limp... and slipped away."
"You killed her?"
"I freed her." Ashley said. "What would sending her back to the pit even accomplish? What was even left of her? I didn't know how you punish someone who sacrifices that much time to make sure that someone faced SOME form of retribution. It was like running a cassette over and over. Eventually, it just wears out. Whatever kind of man he was before, the torture just obliterated his horrible personality. But it did the same to her, leaving her with nothing but her pain. And when he was gone, she was left just as hollow, eaten away by her hate.
"I checked the sheriff to make sure he was dead and not just catatonic. His hair and beard broke when I touched it, it was so thin and long. His teeth were all short and stubby, like he had ground them down to stumps clenching them together in agony. His jaw muscles felt like bone. But there was something in his mouth. Before he died, she had stuffed his mouth with... prefabricated communion wafers."
"Why?"
