A Little Piece Of Heaven

Lilith opened one eye and stared up at Stefanie, wondering why the other eye didn’t open and what the fuck had just happened. The fact that her friend was still in the States last time she checked added to the confusion and blooming pain. With a groan she tried to sit up, Stefanie pushing her back down quickly with a shake of the head.
“No moving, I need to twist your dislocated shoulder back in.”
“Wha….AHHHHHHHHHH FUCKING JESUS FUCKING CHRIST !”
Stefanie avoided the flying fist and nodded as there was the satisfying crack of bone. Lilith passed back out and she left her friend on the bed before walking around the house again. She couldn’t remember getting here, just flashes of blue flame and Johnny’s face in distance before everything had gone black and she had woken up alone and unsure of everything. Whoever had taken her had not appeared but the house itself was strange enough to keep her interested. Stefanie had no concept of how long she had been here but it seemed that there were no exits downstairs, the windows looked out on countryside but she couldn’t break them and night had never fallen.
It was frightening and yet Stefanie had not panicked, trying to find a way to break free in the house itself and finding that there seemed to be no working electricity or even running water apart from the bathroom tap. Even more disconcerting, food only appeared when she wasn’t in that room and that had kind of happened with Lilith. Stefanie had been working on freeing one of the light switches from the wall and when she had gone upstairs Lilith had been lying on the bed, bruised and bloodied as if she had been in a very bad fight and lost.
It was a comfortable enough prison but a prison none the less and Stefanie wanted out. She knew that Johnny and the gang would be trying to find her, now that Lilith was here and injured she was willing to bet that Syn was ripping the universe apart but they could still help themselves. She had pulled bedding from the second bedroom and set about patching Lilith up as best she could, noting now that the sun never moved from the back of the house to the front. Clearly this was not a place rooted in physical parameters and it made her feel better in some ways that Lilith was here, anything mystical could now be accounted for too.
“Can…we try that again without you doing that ?”
Stefanie smiled, sitting on the end of the bed and looking at Lilith critically.
“Do you know what happened ?”
“No… I was with Syn and we were in some farmhouse. Think something blew up and now I’m here. Did the house land on me ? Is Syn ok ?”
Lilith tried to think around her headache and looked around the room from the one eye that seemed to be working. It looked horribly familiar and she looked again at Stefanie as her friend looked back, pale and worried.
“I don’t know. I was in Washington when the house there blew. I couldn’t find Johnny and then these things in black cowls landed on me. Next thing I know I’m here. There are no exits, the sun never goes down and food appears at random.”
“In other words, someone is fucking with us.”
Stefanie nodded, helping Lilith to sit up and watching the furious temper begin to form on her friends face. Lilith herself knew that things were getting worse, not only was she in pain it appeared that this place had some major mojo hanging in it. She could feel that she was helpless, magic couldn’t help them here and Lilith knew why.
“Stef, have you tried prising the place open ?”
“It’s all wrong, no running water apart from one room. None of the electrics work. There are no bloody doors for fuck’s sake.”
Stefanie giggled as Lilith stuck her tongue out. It felt so much better to have someone here, being alone was not something she had ever been comfortable with. After fifty years she was used to the boys being around, her sisters nearby and Claire always in her head if she needed advise of reassurance, that point made her look back at Lilith who was now attempting to move her legs.
“Can you hear Claire ?”
“No, I’m useless here too. This place is time locked. Magic won’t work here.”
Stefanie blinked, helping Lilith painfully to her feet and following her as Lilith limped to the window to confirm her suspicions. This was not good, a time lock required significant power and timing to pull off. Whoever had taken them was not fucking around and her fear for Syn and Johnny increased.
“How do you know ?”
“This is the farmhouse that I was in when it blew up. Something happened at that instant to freeze it and now we’re stuck until we either get released or we find a way to break it. The gang could be standing in this very spot right now and see nothing but rubble. We don’t exist in that reality anymore. I’ve heard about this shit but never seen it done.”
Stefanie went cold. It was bad enough that magic wouldn’t help them but to be an entire dimension away from help was not good. Lilith was having trouble staying upright, fuelled more y rage than anything else. They checked all the rooms again, nothing helping to ease the feeling of being rats trapped in a cage and completely useless. Being helpless was not something that either of them took to easily.
“There has to be a way.”
Lilith admired the optimism, shifting uncomfortably against the headboard and trying to ignore the horrible picture of the two old maids that had provided such amusement before. Syn had been in front of her when the world exploded, she had a deep cold feeling in her stomach that he would have taken more of the blast and it added to the desire to rip whoever had done this to pieces.
“Can we hotwire anything ?”
Stefanie shook her head, reaching in her pocket for the one idea she had come up with.
“No but we can start a fire. Whoever has us here needs us for something or we’d be dead. They will have to make an appearance if we provoke them enough.”
Lilith grinned and followed Stefanie into the other bedroom. They piled the covers and curtain onto the bed and held the flickering lighter to it, enjoying the moment as the smoke started to grow and small flames licked at the flammable sheets. Within minutes a small fire was burning, the girls stepping back and carefully adding more fuel. It started to get hot, the smoke trailing into the hallway before there was an enormous flash of wind and light. Stefanie hit one wall hard, Lilith flung in the opposite direction as all of their hard work was extinguished in one icy blast.
“Fuck, Lilith ? Lily ? Shit….”
Stefanie painfully crawled toward her friend, seeing that Lilith had landed awkwardly against the wall and redislocated her right shoulder. She tried to shake her awake and hardly noticed that there was someone behind her until an amused voice broke into her concentration.
“Nice try. I admire the ingenuity.”
Stefanie jumped, turning fast and getting between Lilith and the young man in front of her. He was alone, tall and not any more than in his early twenties. Definitely attractive if a little thin, a shock of dark curly hair falling into his eyes. For a moment they stared at each other before he spoke again.
“We’re not going to hurt you. We need your help.”
“So you kidnap us ?”
He shrugged with a smile, one foot poking Lilith’s leg.
“This one tends to be…unreasonable. A business proposition from a friend of mine and you two are just the people to provide it for me. When I get what I want I will let you go.”
Stefanie saw that his eyes glowed red when he mentioned this friend, of course he wouldn’t be human and she now knew that they were seriously outmatched. The boy grabbed her chin, turning her face this way and that before letting her go and looking down at Lilith. For one brief moment she considered trying to fight before he picked Lilith up with one hand and shook her until there was a yelp of pain.
“Come on Lilith, explain to Stefanie who I am.”
Lilith squinted, trying to breath at being dropped back onto the floor before looking up. She recognised him, frantically trying to place where from before a grin appeared and she waved a hand at him.
“Fuck Toy ! Damn, thought you were dead. What the fuck is this about Arin ?”
He smirked, pleased that she recognised him and even willing to forgive the nickname she had given him all those years ago. That Syn had liked him, that they had shared a bed on occasion, had always pissed Lilith off a little and it seemed neither had forgotten it. They stared at each other as she rested her back on the wall and tried to look reassuringly at Stefanie.
“A deal. You have talents we need. Obey like good girls and you get to go free. Disobey and I kill your boys one by one. I’ll leave Syn to last, he looked pretty fucked up last time I saw him.”
Lilith growled, her fingers itching to garrotte the bitch where he stood even if he did kill them both. There was a long moment of tension, neither willing to look away before Stefanie put herself between them. Her gaze was focused, steady and now determined to find a way that she could leave some sort of clue for Johnny to find them.
“I don’t care who you are, what’s the deal ?”
Arin walked away, his back to them as he looked at the destroyed room. It would be wise to deal with the smarter of the two, Lilith was less of a threat without the ability to rip his head from his shoulders with the flick of a wrist. He would only give her limited abilities back to help his boss perform the ritual.
“We intend to wake a very powerful demon. The idiot humans found him for us in Germany but don’t know what he is. To do that we need to build a machine to align the stars. That’s your part, the engineering required a genius. It also requires dark magic, that’s down to the bitch.”
“Not. A. Fucking. Chance.”
Lilith gave Arin a beautiful smile and obscene finger gesture which was met with a stony silence. This time he did not touch her, merely looking at Stefanie before running a finger or two through her hair. The threat was implicit, Lilith knew that a demon of his strength could badly hurt Stefanie merely by twisting the wrong bone.
“Johnny has a pretty girl here right ? Bet she’s really good to him.”
The hand slid down Stefanie’s cheek and across her breasts, backing her into the opposite wall. She could see the demon resting under his skin, the cheekbones becoming angular and small horns ridging his forehead. She whimpered a little and Lilith spat blood on the floor.
“Fine. Take us to the organ grinder because I’m sick of talking to the monkey.”
Arin looked back at her, savouring the victory before pointing towards the stairwell. The room shimmered and shifted, time righting itself to his design and putting everything straight and unburned in the prison he intended to keep them.
“He’s downstairs. Be my guest.”

Notes

Little competition......guess the villain !