It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell. Buddha

There are a few things they never tell you about the levels of hell. The first is that for every minute that passes in the mortal world above you, a day or more will pass in hell. Your torment is not everlasting, but it seems so. They say that hell is other people; for some, this will never be true.

For Nat, hell was something quite different.

She was paralysed, held so still, so unable to move that she could not even muster the energy to blink her staring eyes. Yet what she could see did not inspire her. Blackness. Darkness. The heavy void of nothingness that haunted her worst nightmares stretched out all around her, silent, mournful, terrifying. She couldn't say how long she had been here, suspended in this gap in reality, able only to hear her panicked thoughts as they ran in circular argument through her mind. Fear had brought cold sweat to her body, her breath quickened and staggered, her pulse galloping while in her mind she only had thought enough for her predicament, for the horror of how she had failed to protect Adam ....for the loss of Rhys.

And then the voices began.

Insidious at first, she barely noticed them above her own frightened contemplations, just whispers in the back of her mind. But slowly, inexorably, they rose to coherency, and she could not shut them out. She heard the screams of those in torment, the souls cast down from purgatory and limbo to suffer for what seemed an eternity before being taken into the body of their worm. She heard the sickening laughter of the demons who gathered them into their levels of hell, who administered that punishment with reckless joy. And she heard words to torment her, to set her already troubled mind on that destructive path toward self-anihilation.

"How much has your angel told you, devushka" Has he told you that he made a bargain with my master" A bargain for a life not your own. A bargain for the safety of a woman he once loved and still loves in the deepest recesses of his heart' A woman he thinks is his soul mate?"

Those cruel words of the demon who had captured her, words that held a ring of truth Nat could not ignore. She knew Rhys still thought fondly of Riley; she knew he still felt pain when he thought of their parting. This pain went too deep to be jealousy alone. It tore into her heart, shredding her open, as into her mind the demon voices wound the future they predicted for her ....shunted aside, left in misery and want to watch as Rhys returned to claim the woman he truly loved, the woman for whom he had dared to make a deal with a devil.

For a moment, the power holding her still faltered, and she found her voice, screaming out her denial of what her enemies tried to force upon her. But the void swallowed up the sound, and though the voices ceased, Nat was left to oscillate through the blackness, weighed down by grief and fear and that awful, consuming, enforced solitude.

But there was anger now, too. Was she really such a threat to Abbadon and his ilk that they had to tear into her like this" Did they really think that Rhys would hesitate even for a moment in his duty just because the demons held her here in torment' If their places were switched, Nat knew she would not hesitate, no matter how painful the aftermath without Rhys might be, and she was merely mortal. Rhys was at least partly divine, an angel who had chosen his path long before he had ever met her. He wouldn't let love keep him from doing what it was he was ordained to do.

The anger flared, fury burning through her body, harnessing the power of her own morphological field to shatter the force that held her in place. And even that knowledge, the understanding that whatever had set her here in this void did not even have the courtesy to maintain a watch over the torment set in place, brought her anger to bear once again. She landed hard in a crouch, one hand slamming down onto what felt like stone ....warm rock, worn smooth by the centuries.

And as this sensation made itself known, her other senses rushed to shake off the shackles of the spell that that been used to hold her captive. She smelt brimstone and sulphur; she tasted the metallic tang of blood on the air; she heard the clash of weapons, the screams of the dying and wounded. Slowly, the darkness was stripped from her eyes, and Nat found herself in the midst of a battlefield, surrounded on all sides by warring parties.

Throughout a fiery gorge - the eighth level of Dante's Inferno, she realised - between pits containing the souls of the fraudulent, demons grappled with what could only be angels, beings of pure light who blazed with sword and shield in a battle older than time itself. What was going on' Had the Second Coming somehow started while she was otherwise engaged" Was this God's retribution against the Morning Star beginning all over again?

A flaming sword whistled by her head, igniting her curls briefly as she ducked and yelped, smothering the stinking scorch in her hair with her own fingers. Yet before she could turn and take stock of what had happened, a strong hand closed around her arm. A hand, not a claw. Nat twisted to look at the owner of that hand, and felt her jaw go slack as she stared.

He was tall, broad, strong, surrounded by a nimbus of radiant light that seemed to set him apart from the other angels who struggled in battle all around them. Golden hair waved about his face as eyes lit with blazing blue light looked into her own, seeming to emanate approval in some indefineable way. He stood protectively over her, too, and with a start Nat realised that he had extended one warm, sturdy wing to wrap about her.

The angel - archangel, for that was the only thing he could be - released her arm as that wing drew her close against his back, defended in the midst of this raging battle and still leaving both his hands free to wield sword and shield against the demons that charged through the gorge to continue attacking. Yet the battle itself was beginning to wane. Across the pock-marked gorge, the angels were beginning to rise, abandoning their personal struggles to forge upward past the towering cliffs that held them enclosed down here.

"Hold onto me, Natalya Pimenova," she heard her apparent guardian say, and it never occurred to her to disobey. Her arms rose to let her hands find grip on the edges of the cuirass the archangel wore even as the wings at his back began to beat, battering her with warm wind as her feet left the ground.

A screech went up from the defeated demons below them, but Nat didn't look down. Her hands tightened against the hard leather that protected the being of light who carried her, startled by the sensation of weightlessness that kept her dangling from his back without fear of falling. Her mind was in a whirl. Had these beings really come into hell just to retrieve her" Was this mission of Rhys' so important to the heavens that even the faintest risk of his hesitation had to be eliminated" And who was this creature bearing her out of hell" Was he truly an archangel, and if so ....was he really Michael, the warrior"

As though sensing her troubled, tumbling thoughts, the angel reached back, his strong hand closing over her side as he spoke. "A promise was made, Natalya Pimenova; a promise we failed to keep. In renewal of that covenant between Rathanael and our Master, you are now a part of that promise."

An image formed in her mind, blotting out everything else that warred for her attention. She saw herself, older but not so much so, her body rounded with pregnancy, curled up on a rug laid over green grass beneath a warm, welcoming sun. She was laughing, too; the genuine, wild laughter that so rarely made itself known in these dark days brought to the surface by the antics of a man and a child not too far away. The man, Nat knew without needing to look closely - it was Rhys, the only man to have ever stormed the bastion of her tightly locked heart and found a place there waiting for him. And the child ....a sweet mix of both of them, wrapped up in his father's arms as the pair of them fell onto the blanket to enclose her in their combined embrace.

Nat gasped, and the image shattered. She was alone, the angel gone, her boots crunching uncomfortably on scattered glass fragments that littered the floor. Back in the apartment, amid the evidence of the struggle that had taken her away in the first place, and yet her heart was lighter now than she could possibly have imagined it would be. Fresh determination settled over her; she would have that promise fulfilled, even if she had to guide Rhys' hand on Joyeuse's hilt herself.

A wet sound came to her ears, the uncomfortable gurgle of air through liquid, and a memory flashed into her mind. Adam, vulnerable, unconscious, a demon's knife at his throat. She turned slowly, reluctant to know what she was going to find.

"Adam?"

((I know! Another cliffhanger! I'm getting good at these!))