by Nadine Mutas
“What the fu—” I whirled around to Azazel, cat-bat saliva dripping from my face, my hair, my fingers.
His smirk was even worse than the spit currently making its way down my neckline and between my breasts. “I told you it’s manageable.”
“The—I—this—” I sputtered and flailed, spraying drops of slobber all around me. “What the hell is this?” I pointed wildly at the ceiling. “How long has it been there?” My voice rose to a squeak. “What does it eat?”
Lines formed around his mouth, the skin on the corners of his eyes tightening. Was that jerk trying not to laugh?
He held up a finger. “A hellcat.” He added a second finger. “Since before you arrived.” Three fingers now. “Vermin.”
I waved my arms around. “And it spits on whatever spontaneously combusts in your house?”
“Convenient, isn’t it?”
“That’s revolting!”
“Oh, I don’t know.” His gaze dropped to my chest, where my drenched T-shirt now shamelessly hugged my breasts, emphasizing my peaked nipples underneath my equally wet bra.
I crossed my arms. “I’d prefer a sprinkler system.”
“So I’d forego the joys of seeing you covered in hellcat saliva?” He clucked his tongue. “Come now. Anything else I can get you, my love?”
I flashed my teeth. “Your head on a plate.”
“I thought you were vegetarian.” He walked backwards toward the door, his eyes dancing with mirth. “So bloodthirsty.”
And before I could throw a cushion after him, he was gone, the door once more shut and locked.
Chapter 6
After he left, I went straight to the shower, peeled myself out of the spit-soaked clothes, and scrubbed myself clean. It took an hour of repeated hair washes to remove any residue of hellcat saliva, and when I finally stepped out of the shower, my skin glowed rosy with how much I’d rubbed soap all over me.
I dressed in a new pair of jeans and a tank top, mindful of the ever-present heat of Hell. When I walked back into the living room, I eyed the gloom-shrouded rafters in the ceiling with caution.
Somewhere up there, Sir Spit A Lot lurked, waiting in the shadows to either devour some vermin—and good Lord, I didn’t even want to know what Hell’s definition of vermin actually was—or douse a spontaneous fire with his spittle. As I stared, the shadows shifted, claws scratched on stone, and a long, black tail swished down to dangle lazily from a rafter.
I shuddered.
I didn’t count as vermin, right? Azazel wouldn’t allow this thing here if it might feel inclined to gnaw on my limbs while I was sleeping.
I hoped.
My gaze fell on the burned tapestry, and I stopped short. It was gone, in its place a new one. The area appeared freshly cleaned, no sign of either the spontaneous combustion from earlier or the saliva fire extinguisher residue.
Someone must have come by and taken care of it while I was in the shower.
I examined the door again, still didn’t find a weakness to exploit, and went on to explore the rest of the rooms more thoroughly than before. To my surprise, the second room now featured my gym bag in addition to the treadmill, and my yoga mat and accessories were propped against the wall.
Exercise equipment, indeed.
Azazel’s words replayed in my mind, and with a new flash of embarrassment I remembered what else he’d brought here.
Face hot and pulse racing, I tried my damnedest to direct my thoughts toward the jerktastic things he’d said—better to be angry than...well, let’s not even go there—but all I could picture was my vibrator in his large hands. How he held it, looked at it, knowing exactly what I’d used it for. Ugh. I did not want to imagine that. Did. Not.
Desperate for a distraction, I turned to the treadmill. How did this even work? I hadn’t seen any electric outlets in the walls anywhere here. This thing wouldn’t run on its own.
On closer inspection, I did find an outlet where the power cord of the treadmill was plugged into. Although it looked...well, precarious would have been an understatement. It appeared entirely, amateurishly self-made, a thing from the earliest days of electrical discovery, straight from the chaotic workshop of a reclusive 19th-century engineer who’d never heard of “safety first.” I suspected I might get an electric shock just by looking at it.
I cleared my throat and backed away from the treadmill. Hey, at least if this thing caught fire, there was a trusty hellcat to spit it out.
I did some yoga, browsed the books in the living room—a few of my own, brought here along with my stuff, in addition to a broad selection of world literature and a handful of genre books related to my reading tastes—had lunch, again delivered by the grumpy goblins, though they kept a closer eye on me now, and by the time “evening” rolled around—noticeable only by the timing of dinner—I was bored stiff out of my mind.
Even as introverted as I was, I’d grown up with an always accessible connection to the wider world in the form of my phone and the various social media and chat apps on it. And like many others of my generation, with the wealth of information on the internet and access to my friends just a swipe and a click away, I never felt truly alone. Among the people I knew, there would always be someone online, available to chat, or someone would have posted new content for me to respond to.
The only time I’d really felt cut off from this constant source of information and connection was when I’d gone camping with my mom once in my later teens. There’d been no Wi-Fi—obviously—and the signal had been so weak and spotty that I couldn’t really connect to the internet during the whole week. True to my status as a technology-spoiled teen, I’d whined about it every day.
But at least I’d had my mom then. Someone I loved who was there, keeping me company, sharing this experience with me. In hindsight, it’d been a wonderful time with her, one of the few vacations we could afford. My dad paid his child support all right—still, money was tight after the divorce.
When I was younger, my mom stayed home with me, giving up her job to take care of me until I entered school, and even then she only applied for a part-time position so that she’d be there for me in the afternoon. That was possible because of my dad’s income, a luxury not many families could afford in those days.
What little she earned with that job, however, was barely enough to provide for us both after the divorce, and she struggled to find a full-time position in her field for quite some time. The job market isn’t kind to mothers who stayed home or cut back on their hours for their kids for more than ten years.
So even with my dad’s alimony, Mom and I struggled for those first few years after our family broke apart. And I could just hear my mom’s voice, bitter and insistent, drilling into me to never depend on a man, to always make sure I stood on my own two feet and be independently financially stable.
“As long as you have your own job that pays your own way,” she would say, the lines around her mouth deepening with bitter regret, “you can always walk away unscathed. Your life is still yours. If everything comes crashing down, you’ll still be standing.” She’d pause then, her gaze turning inward, her voice growing quiet. “You won’t be buried under the rubble.”
Now, as I sat there in the medieval living room in my quarters in Hell and surveyed what was left of my once independent life, the memory of my mom’s warning clogged my throat. What would she say if she knew? Despite her trying so hard to secure a better future for me, I’d ended up in an even worse position than she was ever in with my dad.
My life was literally in the hands of the man—demon—I married, and he had full control over every aspect of it. I couldn’t even move freely.
My fate had come full circle to not just repeat the mistakes my mom made, but increase them by multiples.
And I knew, without a doubt, that Mom would weep for me.
That did it. The fury and despair scratching at my throat, tightening my chest, erupted in a scream as I grabbed the remains of my dinner and hurled t
he plates at the mockingly closed door. Pulse thundering in my body, breath heavy, I stared at the streak of sauce and spaghetti making its way down toward the floor.
Useless, I knew. To smash random things in uncontainable wrath. But sometimes, when your voice wasn’t heard, when your needs were ignored, all you had left was the urge to break something.
Claws scratching on stone, the flap of wings, a shadow descending from above. I jumped back as the hellcat landed on the floor in a whirl of black, bat-like wings and sniffed at the remnants of my dinner decorating the door. Its dark gray tongue darted out and lapped up the food.
I held my breath. I’d only seen parts of it before, half-concealed in the gloom of the ceiling, glimpses at a thing that shouldn't exist, that my mind couldn’t make sense of. Now, it crouched in the full glow of the torches, the flickering firelight dancing over its smooth black pelt that covered its entire body except the wings. Those were of the same membranous, dark skin as one would see in bats, but instead of being a mutated form of its front legs, the wings were extra appendages growing out of the shoulder blades.
The hellcat’s real front legs were in the normal, natural position of all felines, lithe and muscled, the paws tipped with claws that were now retracted. Its ears were larger than a normal cat’s, more like a serval’s. Overall, it was the size of a lynx maybe, definitely bigger than your average house cat.
If there were to be a perfect mix of a cat and a bat, taking the best parts of each and smashing them together for the most amazing crossover in the animal kingdom, this would be it.
I must have made an appreciative sound, because one large ear swiveled toward me while the hellcat kept on lapping up my leftovers. Once done, it sat up, licking its maw and cleaning its face with its paw in the universal cat way of post-meal grooming.
I stood rooted to the spot, fascinated by this creature that topped off all the out-of-this-world things I’d seen and heard over the past twenty-four hours. Even when the beautiful beast turned its elegant head, its luminous yellow eyes focusing on me with faint feline interest, I was riveted, unable to move.
“You are so pretty,” I whispered.
A slow blink from those mesmerizing eyes. I know, a voice murmured in my head, and with a flap of its wings, the hellcat soared up to the ceiling again, vanishing in the dark.
Eyes wide, I stared after it, my mouth hanging open. “Can you talk?”
Silence greeted my squeaked question.
Had I hallucinated that? Was I losing it already? I’d barely been a full day in Hell…reality couldn’t be slipping away from me that fast, could it?
Symptomatic of my new normal, there was no one here to confirm or refute.
I didn’t see Azazel again for almost two weeks. In fact, I didn’t see anyone except the gremlin demons for several days in a row, bringing me meals, cleaning, and—to my utter irritation—installing that damned Japanese toilet. Occasionally, I’d catch glimpses of the hellcat, but that was it.
The isolation started wearing on me. I’d never been this alone. To make matters worse, my phone’s battery gave up on day two, despite the flight mode and me only picking it up once to swipe through the pictures. I deliberately looked at the photos for an hour, knowing the angry red of the battery sign meant this was my last chance to see my loved ones...not just in pictures, but ever, if Azazel insisted on being a cruel prick.
I dared play a video, drawing more from the battery, but I needed to hear my mom’s voice. My vision blurred, my eyes filling with hot tears, my chest tight and hurting. When the screen abruptly turned black, the phone finally dead, I curled up into a ball and wept for hours.
On day ten-or-something, I started talking back to the Japanese toilet. Sadly, it wasn’t much of a conversationalist. In a fit of spite, I asked the gremlins to bring me a sharpie, which I then used to write Azazel’s name on the damned toilet. Was it petty and childish? Yes. Did it give me the grim satisfaction of defecating on his namesake? Also yes.
What could I say? Isolation did quite a number on me.
Suffice it to say, when Azmodea came to visit, I was so grateful to see her—see anyone—I’d have kissed her feet.
“Darling!” she tweeted as she swept into the room, all glamour and glitz in a dress that could have been snatched from a movie set of the 40s. Taking my face in her hands, she kissed me on both cheeks and peered at me with drawn brows. “Oh, you look dreadful. Has he been starving you?”
“Of attention,” I muttered, unable to keep my tongue in check.
She tsked. “He’s been in a mood lately, let me tell you. So much brooding, randomly snapping at his people. You know, like a human on a particularly prohibitive diet, denying themselves what their body needs the most.” She casually waved her hand in the air. “Not a very apt comparison, since we don’t need food, but—” Staring at me, she pursed her lips. “Hm.”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s a right stubborn git, is what he is. Never you mind, I’ll talk to him.” Her voice a murmur, she added, “I seriously don’t know why he prefers to suffer.”
Him, suffer? How ridiculous. Before I could even laugh at that idea, though, someone else spoke up.
“Um, because he’s Azazel, patron saint of stuck-up control freaks?” a male voice said from behind Azmodea.
I hadn’t even noticed anyone else being in the room—Azmodea had a way of monopolizing my attention, glittering like a jewel in the spotlight. Now I peered around her to the man—demon?—who’d spoken.
His dark eyes, framed by thick black lashes, sparked with humor, mirrored in the wry grin curving his full lips. His skin a smooth brown tan, a short beard dusting his strong jaw, he held himself with natural confidence. The torchlight reflected on his long black hair, loosely bound at his nape.
Stunning. That was the word echoing in my brain as I stared at him. If I’d passed him on the street, I’d have done a double-take and turned to ogle him some more. He was the type of man who’d arrest your attention, not just by the refined beauty of his features, but by his poise, by the way his smile seemed like a beacon drawing your eyes.
“Ah yes,” Azmodea said, “let me introduce you. This is my son, Mammon. Mammon, meet your uncle’s secret wife.”
That word stung unexpectedly. Or maybe not so unexpectedly? In light of how my father had an entire secret family, was it any wonder I’d react with intrinsic bitterness to that concept?
“Enchanté,” Mammon murmured with a glint in his eye, taking my hand and placing a kiss on the back of it.
I cleared my throat. “Nice to meet you.”
Azmodea clapped her hands together. “Splendid! Isn’t it just swell to get to know more of the family? I figured you’d love to see some other faces than that of my dear brother—I just wasn’t sure if you were free, you know. I assumed he was keeping you busy rolling around that big bed, but then I found out he’s been throwing himself into work lately and roaming about, and I just knew I had to sneak by.” She swung herself onto the sofa. “Let’s sit, dear. We were so rudely interrupted last time, but there’s still so much to talk about.”
I sat next to her, with Mammon perching on the armrest of the chair opposite us.
“Is it true,” he said, crossing his legs, his hands clasped over his knee, “that you tricked him into a marriage contract?”
Good God, would I ever live that down?
“No.” I gritted my teeth. “I mean, I don’t know. I had no clue what I was doing. Honestly, it was just a desperate teenage séance gone wrong. Okay, sure, my friend and I were kind of naively hung up on this idea that we had to be married by the age of twenty-five, or else we’d shrivel into undesirable wallflowers and would die alone—I know, I know—” I held up my hands “Too many historical romances, not enough frontal cortex developed yet, but hey, no one ever claimed young teenagers have a good grasp of impact and consequences. There’s a reason the age of majority is set years after those hormones screw us up…”
Mammon cast a glance at Azmodea. “This is even better than I thought.”
She nodded. “I know.”
His smile was incandescent. “No wonder he’s been so grouchy.”
“Yep.”
“I don’t think anyone else has ever gotten him like that.”
Azmodea raised a brow. “Sure hasn’t.”
“How long do you think we can bring this up at family dinners?”
She tilted her head, eyes narrowed. “Oh, at least the next hundred years.”
“He’ll be so peeved,” Mammon said, his voice dreamy, eyes sparkling with delight.
Azmodea nodded sagely. “Even more than when you sent him those hellbats.”
Mammon snickered. “How long did it take him to wash the guano off—three hours?” He turned to me, one hand over his heart. “You,” he declared solemnly, “are my new favorite being. This gift you’ve given us is—” he kissed the tips of his fingers “—priceless.”
“Gift?” I repeated hollowly.
“Why, yes.” He beamed. “You see, my uncle has this impenetrable wall of control around him, a perfect facade of strength and invulnerability, like he can do no wrong, has no faults, not a single chink in his armor. He’s been unbearable with his goody-two-shoes haughtiness for far too long.”
“Far too long,” Azmodea echoed, shaking her head.
“You managed to take him down a peg, without even trying.” Mammon grinned. “And now we have all this ammunition against him…”
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat, bitterness churning in my stomach, “I’m sure glad to be of service to your personal family feud, at the expense of my freedom and sanity.”
Mammon tilted his head in question.
“What you consider a gift,” I elaborated, “is a life sentence of isolation for me.” I waved my hands at the room. “According to my absentee husband, this is all I need to live for...I don’t know, what’s my life expectancy now? Do I live as long as you guys?”
