featuring a female Angel, arms, legs and wings spread wide and chained to pillars, and three male Angels wrapped around her, penetrating every orifice. Whoever had made the statue had designed it so streams of Hellfire spurted into the bound Angel’s orifices at irregular intervals, mimicking orgasms.
Tacky, thought Nyx . Unnecessary, and doesn’t really add anything to the eroticism of the room. Now where the fuck is Persephone?
Nyx didn’t want to send her mind out in a room full of Angels. The power that was keeping her unnoticed was hardly sufficient to disguise a direct sending if it was intercepted by the wrong person. So instead, she circled the room again and again, trying to spot Persephone. She looked carefully at each tangle of bodies, sorting out limbs and wings, making sure she matched each body to a face, in case Persephone was hidden by her enthusiastic partners. She couldn’t see her. Nyx growled in frustration and landed by the statue. Hellfire spurted onto Nyx’s shoulder, but after drowning in the stuff, Nyx didn’t really care about a few droplets. She walked another slow circuit of the room and still couldn’t see Persephone.
She’s in here. I know it.
Nyx ended back at the statue. It was as ugly as it had been from the air, only up close it looked even cruder, as if it had been slapped together over a rough shape, with barely any attention given to detail. The legs and arms were rough. The openings where the male Angels penetrated the statue were crude and barely rendered. The only solidly built parts of the statue were the chains. Even the eyes seemed little more than holes save that there was something behind them.
Realization dawned on Nyx the moment before she saw the eyes inside the statue blink.
Holy fuck. Persephone.
Lucifer hadn’t rewarded Persephone. He’d trapped her inside the statue, with Hellfire gushing up inside her body, so that she would be forced to continually watch and never be able to take part.
Nyx took her eyes off Persephone and looked around. Her don’t-notice-me command was still working. None of the other Descended even glanced her way.
How am I going to get her out of there?
The only way to free her was to break the statue, and there was no way that Nyx could do that discreetly.
Nyx leaned back against the ass of one of the male Angel statues and enjoyed the view around her. Angel flesh was beautiful flesh, and there was a great deal of it engaged in passionate activity around her. She smiled and crossed her arms, like a pleased spectator.
And as soon as her skin made contact with the statue, she sent her mind inside it, feeling how it had been made.
It was carved Hellstone, of course, made by hacking off bits of Hellstone-trapped souls and reshaping them to the sculptor’s whims. The Hellfire that coursed out of the cocks of the male Angel statues came from a fissure deep beneath their feet. The cocks themselves were barbed, so that any attempt to rip Persephone free would give her incredible agony.
Nasty, Nyx thought with a certain grudging admiration. Lucifer always was about the sex.
She began manipulating the Hellstone in the statue, starting with the cocks. She smoothed the shafts and blocked the ends so no Hellfire could escape. She weakened the base of the statue in a dozen places, then narrowed the pipes that led down to the fissure below. She could already feel the pressure building up beneath them.
She felt movement inside the statue as Persephone came back to her senses and the gaping wounds in her body healed. Nyx opened her mind to Persephone and said, Wait.
Nyx! The cry was both relief and joy. What happened to you? How did you get out?
Later, Nyx sent. Wait until the Hellfire sprays into the room, then break out. I’ll be waiting outside .
Nyx pushed herself off the statue, spread her wings and began a slow, lazy circle upward toward the windows. She had all the time in the world, now.
Or at least until the statue explodes , Nyx
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