Thomas Sniegoski - A Hundred Words for Hate

But then he followed the elder’s eyes, and felt the growing tightness in the flesh of his stomach.

“You fucking didn’t,” Francis slurred, not wanting to look down at himself, but really having little choice. He leaned farther back against the table and slowly tilted his chin down to see the extent of the damage.

“You have always been a prominent fixture in the visions gifted to me by the fruit of the Tree,” Malachi said.

Francis looked down at his chest, seeing the fine line that started just below his sternum and went down to his groin. Blood had started to seep from the edges, making the line—the cut—that much more noticeable.

“And little by little I figured out why.”

His legs began to give out, and he caught himself on the stone table’s edge, the sudden movement causing the incision in his belly to tear apart, exposing his inner workings to the outside world.

“In using you as their agent, the Thrones provided me with the perfect all-purpose tool for my needs: strong, cunning, ruthless, penitent, and quite resourceful.”

Francis’s hands went to his belly, and he pressed them against the diagonal cut, desperate to keep his insides from sliding out onto the floor.

“And they gave you certain gifts . . . certain useful gifts to make you a better executor of God’s will.”

Malachi retrieved what looked to be a bowl from a collection of crap cluttering a formation of rock jutting from the cave wall used as a shelf.

“One of those gifts is in your blood.”

Someone had pulled the cave floor out from beneath him, and Francis found himself dropping down to his knees. The impact was jarring and he felt what was inside him—what he wanted to keep inside him—press against his hands. He was successful in preventing his inner workings from leaving his body.

But there was nothing he could do about the blood.

Malachi placed the bowl beneath him, capturing the scarlet spill as it rained down from his belly.

“The Thrones gave you the gift of passage . . . the ability to open doorways from here to there.”

Malachi’s eyes looked around the cave, dust and bits of rocky debris raining down as the Morningstar continued his renovation project outside.

“From here . . . to there.”

The elder bent down to Francis’s level, looking at him eye-to-eye.

“The gift is in your blood,” Malachi said as he retrieved the bowl, its contents splashing out over the rim.

The cave shook as if having a fit, huge cracks suddenly appearing in the floor as well as the wall. Unable to stay upright, Francis fell onto his side, his hand momentarily leaving his stomach—the results unpleasant. Despite its anxiety, the Hellion was there to sniff at the bloody innards that had temporarily spilled. The beast growled at him, snapping at his fingers as he attempted to retrieve them and shove them back where they belonged.

Malachi stood there, silently watching as Francis struggled with the beast over a section of his intestine.

“I’m done with you, Fraciel,” the elder announced. “My visions of you end with the collection of your blood, and my escape from . . .”

He looked around the cave again, larger pieces of rock and dust raining down from the ceiling.

“. . . this place. Strangely enough, I’ve grown rather fond of it during the time I’ve waited for your arrival.”

Francis had managed to take back the rubbery piece of his guts, shoving it deep inside his abdominal cavity, while giving everything that he had to remaining conscious.

A large section of rock dropped from the ceiling to land atop the Hellion’s skull-like head. The beast yelped, retreating back toward a patch of shadows along the wall.

The place was coming apart at the seams; it wouldn’t be long now.

Malachi turned his back to him, approaching an area of wall with the bowl of his blood.

Francis willed himself to get up; despite all the pain, and his current opened condition, he forced himself up onto his knees.

Standing at the wall, Malachi casually glanced over his shoulder, smiling as he dipped his fingers in the bowl of fresh blood and began to paint upon the wall.

“I’d like to reiterate how important you’ve been to this entire process,” he said, painting the angelic sigils—the beginnings of a spell—upon the cave wall. “It could not have been done without you.”

The sounds coming from outside were pretty scary, and Francis could only imagine what was happening.

Exactly what’s going to be happening inside not too long from now , he thought, swaying as the cave shook, and the large cracks branched off to smaller cracks that begat even more cracks than that.

A powerful wind rushed through the chamber, traveling down the passage and carrying with it the stink of brimstone and transformation.

Malachi continued to smear the angel blood upon the wall, dropping the still partially filled bowl to the cave floor when finished.

“But now it’s time that I said good-bye.”

The blood sigils had begun to glow with a thrumming black energy—the shapes growing steadily larger, colliding with others and eventually merging to become a single piece of expanding darkness.

Francis could do nothing but watch . . . hold in his insides and watch.

A black portal grew steadily larger upon the wall, an annoying hum of expended magick cutting through the ruckus of the crumbling cave. He thought about maybe using his intestine as a lasso, preventing the elder from escaping, but had doubts about his aim.

Malachi chanced another glance over his shoulder before ducking into the passage to be swallowed up by the bottomless darkness that had manifested there.

So much for that , Francis thought as the cave convulsed fitfully, the walls crumbling, the floor shifting violently beneath him, knocking him back to his side.

For a moment he imagined his situation couldn’t get any worse, but then he noticed the rope of bloody intestine— his rope of bloody intestine—cooling upon the rubble-covered floor.

That isn’t good.

And the crazed Hellion emerging from its hiding place, drawn again by the smell of his exposed insides.

It was totally fucking awesome that life—what little he had left of it—could still manage to surprise him.

The Hellion lunged, opening its cavernous mouth to take a bite from his intestine.

Is it my large or small intestine? the former Guardian angel wondered, before deciding that it truly didn’t matter.

He looked into the beast’s horrible maw, at all its teeth and its fat, sluglike tongue, and hoped that the monster got the nastiest case of food poisoning from him.

Francis watched as the Hellion’s snout dipped down; the front razor-sharp-looking teeth were about to close upon the slimy, dirt-covered piece of flesh when the floor beneath the creature suddenly disappeared, and the beast that was about to nibble upon him was gone.

It was like something out of a classic Warner Bros. cartoon, and Francis actually managed to let loose with a barklike laugh that just about ended his life.

Consciousness leaking away, he watched through dimming eyes as the remaining sections of floor around him continued to fall away, the ground beneath him eventually disappearing as the walls of the cave collapsed, exposing it to the outside world.

To the hell outside.

Francis was falling, the sudden sensation of weightlessness triggering a treasured memory of the last time he’d flown.

Before his fall from grace.

The mountains of Hell were crumbling all around him, clouds of dirt and debris being sucked up into the swirling maelstrom that his broken body had now become part of.

And to think he actually believed he was going to die under the teeth and claws of a Hellion. It just went to show how one could never be sure about anything.