Infernal Angel by Edward Lee Read Free Book Online

and her friends had invaded Hell time and time again, harassing the authorities, striking down Lucifer’s agents, destroying power plants, Constabulary stations, and evil tabernacles like a squad of guerilla fighters. During these visits, she thought it best to maximize her time: while her search for Lissa was perpetual, Cassie and her friends felt it only appropriate to wreak a little havoc along the way—terrorism, by any other name. Once, they’d scaled the Industrial Zone’s hundred-foot iron walls and managed to shut down the Central Power Plant by closing a pressure-relief valve at the exact same time the furnace was being stoked. It hadn’t taken the outflow gases long to skyrocket, and the Plant’s exterior structure—the size of a football stadium—to spectacularly explode. The detonation rocked the entirety of the district, flattened the Foundry, and toppled all the Bone-Grinding Stations, all during peak hours. Lastly, the explosion had triggered a seismic shift which caused an impressive hellquake, opening a thousand-foot long fissure across the Zone. Not bad for three girls barely out of their teens. Last fall, Cassie had entered the Mephistopolis alone—she’d been bored and her CD player was broken—and she’d cast an Enchantment Spell on an entire garrison of Constabularies—Satan’s police. She’d ordered them one by one into Boniface Square’s Flesh-Processing Terminal where they’d each calmly and willingly lie down on the primary conveyor belts. The terminal’s sweatshop of thousands of workers didn’t bat an eye as the Constabs were submitted to “processing”; they were fileted alive, muscles promptly shorn off bone, organs removed, skin flensed—all to be tossed into the constant parade of rolling hoppers. It was in these terminals that most of the city’s food came from; Cassie liked the idea of demons unknowingly feasting on police officers. She wondered if they tasted like chicken. Time and time again, either with her friends or without, Cassie had returned to that primeval city, racing through its crimson alleys, blasting any demon, Usher, or Golem with a mere thought, offending Lucifer at any opportunity, using her powers as an Etheress to simply do her part. But even as her powers accelerated, so did those of her adversaries. Hell’s resistance movement—the Satan Park Contumacy—had been her greatest ally in the early days—an entire army of anti-satanic terrorists—but they’d all been wiped out by a single Faith Plague engineered by Lucifer’s Biowizards and Arch-Locks at the College of Spells and Discantations. Millions strong, the Contumacy was destroyed overnight, each and every member succumbing to one of Lucifer’s favorite afflictions: Karyolysis, Hell’s equivalent to nesh-eating disease. The pus and putrefactive slime from all those Contumacy members rotting to death 43 at once had actually formed a lake in the middle of Satan Park. Lucifer had immediately inducted the lake as a national landmark, and often ordered convicts and vagrants to be publically executed in it, via drowning.
    But every time Lucifer and his agents struck, Cassie struck back. Since she’d been granted these Ethereal Powers, she knew that it was her obligation to use them, against the very entity that imprisoned her sister. Via and Hush were gone now, either destroyed or captured, and Xeke had turned out to be a traitor. Cassie was alone but she wouldn’t let that fact stop her.
    Instead, something else did. The reason she was in this mental hospital in the first place. Little more than a month ago, unknown envoys of Lucifer had burned down her house and killed her father. The fire had destroyed the Deadpass. Now, understanding more than she ever had about the true nature of Hell and her powers as an Etheress, Cassie had never been more helpless. She wanted to go back, to keep going back, until she found Lissa in that endless city of the damned.
    But she couldn’t go back now,