Life isn't exactly ordinary for Julane Jones, especially since she's half-human and half-demon. When she decides to be a carrier for a human-underworld delivery service and accidentally ends up stuck in Hell, her already unusual world becomes even m...
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Like asphyxiant hydrogen cyanide in a gas chamber, the putrid stench of death choked the room. The bodies of the two creatures we had killed earlier had already decomposed to the state where a plethora of maggots was spilling out of their gaping mouths, and gangrene had taken over. Their rate of putrefaction was unusually rapid; it was as if their organs had been desperate to leave their bodies all along. As jet-black as asphalt, the skin had eaten away their clothes to nothing but threads and began peeling from the rotting muscles like a snake shedding its skin. The whole scene was horrific, considering it had merely been less than an hour since the incident.
Shaking with goosebumps, I turned away from the gore site and fixated my gaze on Devlin. Calmer than the wind at the eye of a hurricane, he looked up at me and stated, "You aren't from the Underworld, are you?"
Tearstained, I wiped my puffed-up face then hugged myself from quivering. "Is it that obvious?"
"Yeah." He averted his eyes to the two corpses on the ground, and deadpanned, "Anyone who has lived here has seen a dead body every once in a while, and, judging by your reaction, this is evidently your first."
Turned away from the decaying masses, we both simultaneously look up at the now overcast sky. The dappled grey and white mass calmed my hard beating heart as I closed my eyes and ruminated to a time my parents forgot to pick me up in middle school. The sky looked just as it did right then – miserable and gloomy. Regardless, I was alone and as the slight drizzle cleansed my soul, a sense of tranquility overcame me. It was as though the world showered little me with forgiveness for my sins.
Everything, just for a fraction of a moment, seemed normal. My trembling died down and, for a change in the past thirty minutes, I didn't yearn for my tears anymore. Instead, I craved the clouds to cry down on me one more time and wash away the blood on my hands.
"You said this was the first test..." I thought aloud as the question slipped off my tongue, "What did you mean by that?"
He answered after a deep breath out. "Strength."
"Strength, huh?" I stifled a laugh.
"Yes, they did it to evaluate us and weed out the weak ones since they don't have much worth..."
He came to an awkward pause, so I spoke up, "Something on your mind, Devil Boy?"
"Well, that's what they did the last couple of times. The 'weeding', that is."
A couple of times? How long had he actually been here? I thought, furrowing my brows, before asking, "What's the next one then?"
"I don't know. They've changed it up so many times; I've lost track." That didn't help at all.
Hopelessness bit his plump, chapped lips shut as defeat and lethargy filled his sharp silver eyes. As each second passed, his strength deteriorated. With each breathy reply, I wondered if I was already conversing with a ghost.
