Hellishly Ever After (Infernal Covenant Book 1)

by Nadine Mutas

  It was either him in the training ring with me, or Hekesha, and, occasionally, Azmodea, like today. Never Azazel. He only watched from the sidelines of the sparring hall, witnessing my repeated failures with barely banked heat in his eyes.

  When I asked him why he didn’t train me himself, he shot me a dark look and said silkily, “Lack of motivation.”

  “What?”

  He crossed his arms. “Any time I’d best you, one way or another, we’d end up on the ground with me between your legs. You’d have no incentive to really fight me.”

  He did have a point. So training with anyone else it was.

  I’d been at this for two weeks, and only today did I manage to theoretically die a few times less than usual. I had no clue why Azazel thought it would make any sense to train me in combat, given the fact that I was and always would be a hundred times weaker than a half-blood. With no powers of my own, I wouldn’t last a minute. And if I had to go up against a full-blood demon, I’d be toast in a matter of seconds, combat training or no.

  Still, I kept at it. A promise was a promise.

  “So,” Azmodea said, flipping on her side to face me, “how have you been holding up?”

  “With what?” Though I could guess what she was aiming at.

  “Your father.” Her silver eyes held the glint of knowledge and old pain.

  We’d touched the subject here and there in the days following my visit to Earth, though I didn’t tell her as much as I did Azazel. Still, it was nice to have someone else to talk to about this—someone who could also sympathize with a complicated paternal relationship.

  My chest constricted, and I took a deep breath that would have hurt my bruised ribs if Azmodea hadn’t healed them right after practice. “I’m okay, I guess. I mean, okay-ish. It still hurts, but I have a feeling it always will. I don’t think about it all the time, but there are moments when it hits me. That he’s really gone. That I’ll never get a chance to talk to him about everything.”

  “Grief comes in waves,” Azmodea said gently.

  “Yeah. In those moments...I wish I were still living on Earth and sort of religious. Because then I’d believe I’d at least see him in Heaven at some point, you know? I now know that place is real, sure, but with me being down here, I also know I’ll never enter Heaven. So, even that little hope is a moot point.”

  Azmodea was silent. Uncharacteristically silent. It was the kind of heavy pause in a conversation after someone said something truly shocking, unbelievably dumb, or so obviously wrong that the other party didn’t even know how to unpack that.

  I lifted my head and stared at her. “What?” Oh, God, what kind of verbal blunder did I commit now?

  Her eyes shimmering silver, she opened her mouth, closed it again, her expression somewhere between pity and pain. She nodded at the demon masseuses, and they left the room.

  “What?”

  “Zoe,” she began in the tone of voice used to deliver news of a loved one’s death, “your father is not in Heaven.”

  I blinked at her. A chill grabbed my stomach and twisted. “What do you mean?” I whispered.

  “He’s either a ghost on Earth—which is unlikely, because then you’d have seen him hang around his house when you were there—or, more likely, he’s...down here.”

  “As a sinner?” I choked out.

  She gave a tight nod.

  The chill spread through my body. “Why?” I sat up, clutching the towel to my chest. “Because he’s an adulterer?” My opinion on his wrongdoing notwithstanding, that was ridiculous, draconian, incredibly Old Testament—

  “Well, yes,” Azmodea cut into my thoughts.

  My whole body tingled, and not in a good way. I couldn't feel my legs. “That’s—that’s absurd!”

  She shrugged. “It’s the law.”

  “Well, it’s a shitty law!”

  She sighed. “We don’t make the rules, Zoe. We just enforce them.”

  No. Oh, no, no, no.

  My mind was racing, thoughts tumbling one over the other.

  “I thought Az told you…”

  Her soft words yanked me out of the spiral of chaos in my head—and heart. I sucked in a breath, my stomach plummeting. “He knows?”

  Azmodea sat up as well. “Zoe…”

  My mouth tasted sour. I hopped off the table, got dressed in record time, and stormed out of the room, ignoring Azmodea’s calls.

  Vengeance jumped up from her lounging position outside the massage room and trotted behind me as I marched through the hallways, nausea churning in my gut. The huge double doors to the training hall loomed in front of me. I pushed them open without breaking my stride.

  The scent of sand and dirt and sweat hit me, mixed with the metallic tang of blood and weapons. In the center of the arena-like room, two shapes moved in a blur of strikes and parries. Blades clanged, swished and sang. Dust flew up and billowed around them. The two fighters moved too fast for me to actually see them, but I didn’t need my eyes to recognize Azazel. His power hovered in the air, a thick charge of honed violence and controlled, efficient brutality.

  “Is it true?” I called out. My voice wavered, barely audible over the sound of the sparring.

  And yet, Azazel stopped the fight immediately. He took one look at me, his features hardening, and jerked his head at his sparring partner. “Out.”

  The other demon left so fast, one would think a hellhound snapped at his heels.

  Azazel faced me, his bare chest heaving slightly. Sweat glistened on his bronze skin, his muscles flexing, the heat of battle licking over his formidable body. Any other time I’d have appreciated the sight of him all worked up and brimming with primal, masculine ferocity. Right now, though, I stared at him with nausea twisting my stomach, my hands clenched to fists at my sides.

  “Is he here?” I rasped. “My father. Is he in Hell?”

  The expression on his face was answer enough.

  My breath hitched. “You knew. You knew, and you didn’t tell me.”

  He moved closer, the sword loosely held in his hand, pointing down. A muscle feathered in his jaw. “And what good would it have done if I told you?”

  “I would have—”

  “What?” His tone sharpened. “You were grieving. And you’d like me to add to that pain?”

  “It’s not about that,” I ground out, my heart thudding so fiercely I feared it might break out of my chest. “We could save him. Find his soul, and—I don’t know, get him out. You guys trade in souls all the time. So trade for him! If he’s yours, then you get to decide how—or if—he is tortured. You could just leave him be, couldn’t you? Or take him to Earth!”

  The tiny muscles around his eyes twitched, his jaw hardening, as if he was trying his damnedest to remain calm against a surge of emotion. “Have you considered that his punishment is just? That there’s a reason he should be here? It’s not something we decide. We don’t drag innocent souls to Hell. They are already marked.”

  “Then unmark him!” I was breathing heavily now, the thought of my dad’s soul suffering from who knew what kind of torture burning through me like nauseous acid. “Yes, what he did was shitty. He lied to us, he betrayed us, he hurt us, but—he shouldn’t burn in Hell for it. That’s for murderers and rapists, for fuck’s sake. He shouldn’t be here.” My eyes prickled hot, and I blinked furiously against the impending threat of tears.

  “There’s nothing I can do for him,” Azazel said, a horrible finality in his voice.

  “Please.” My throat clogged up. “Please, you have to find him. I can’t just leave him here. If you could just find out where—”

  “I already know.” His rough interruption cut me off. “I know exactly where he is.”

  Startled, I closed my mouth and stared at him. A storm of epic proportions hid behind his eyes, glimpses of violently leashed, frustrated rage showing in the fiery cracks in his skin.

  “Lucifer has him,” he said through gritted teeth.

  The floor fell out f
rom under me. My vision went a little sideways.

  “There’s an archive,” he went on, “where all souls are logged. Their names, their origins, who caught them, and where they are kept now. I made an inquiry after we returned. A demon from Lucifer’s territory captured your father’s soul, brought it down here, and then traded it up. It has been added to the cattle in Lucifer’s personal demesne.”

  Cattle. I choked on my breath, and bile rose up my throat. I covered my mouth with my hand.

  “There’s no trading for him, Zoe. There’s no buying him out. Not with Lucifer. Not with our history. As soon as I ask him for this one particular soul, it’ll paint a target on your father’s back. Lucifer will keep him just to spite me. And do not ever underestimate how astute he is—by now I’m sure he’ll know about you as my ‘pet,’ and if I ask him for your father’s soul, he’ll put two and two together and will probably pour acid on him in front of me just to see if I flinch.”

  I staggered back, the image of my father screaming in agony as his spiritual skin corroded under acid far too vivid in my mind.

  “If his soul were in another demon’s territory,” Azazel continued, his voice low and rough, “I’d have options. Depending on the demon’s rank, I could either sneak in and steal it, or march in there and take it by brute force. I can’t do that with Lucifer. His demesne is the best guarded among all the domains in Hell. Anything I could try would be akin to suicide. There’s no scenario where I would come out of this on top.” His hand flexed around the sword hilt. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to give you false hope before I knew where his soul was, and after I found out—telling you would only hurt you.”

  With my hand still covering my mouth, I met his gaze, my entire body trembling.

  My father was here, in the same realm as me, and yet he might as well have been in a different dimension. I couldn’t help him. He would suffer, day in and day out, for who knew how long, while I stood by, powerless to do anything.

  The irony. The goddamn irony of it all. My estranged father, who’d ruined our family, ended up in Hell, and instead of it making me rejoice for poetic justice, it broke my heart. And here I was in Hell, married to a demon, but instead of it giving me any sort of power to change my father’s fate, all it gave me was a lesson in helpless anguish.

  A sound of despair escaped my tightened throat.

  Despite all the hurt he’d caused me and my mom, despite years of pain and resentment and broken childhood dreams, the thought of him being tortured shattered something inside me, a small, soft part that had stubbornly resisted calcification under bitter cynicism.

  How could I live here knowing he was being ripped apart? There was no way I could ever relax, smile or laugh, with the certainty of his suffering hanging over me like a toxic storm cloud.

  I couldn’t shake the image of my father’s soul being tortured, over and over, with acid and hellhounds and fire and a thousand ways I couldn’t even fathom. The cries and wails of the damned souls echoed in my mind, the piercing agony in their voices making me taste bile.

  Nausea bubbled in my stomach, boiled up, up, up until I gagged. Convulsing under a violent tremor, I sank to my knees and vomited.

  I barely noticed Azazel kneeling beside me, holding my hair back. My guts twisted, bucked, and I puked, over and over, until my throat burned, my stomach ached as if grated to shreds, and nothing came up anymore. Still, I dry-heaved, shivering uncontrollably. Tears ran down my face, and I gasped for air.

  Azazel’s arms closed around me, pulled me to him. White-hot anger sparked in my veins. I jerked and tried to get out of his hold. He didn’t let me go. With the kind of unshakable patience that drove my irrational fury only higher, he held me tight as I fought him like a wildcat.

  I bucked and writhed, pummeled his chest, angry, so fucking angry, at him, at this fucked-up situation, at this fucking twist of fate that put me in the care of the one demon in Hell who was so high on Lucifer’s shit list that he couldn’t even ask for a single soul. Fury seared me from the inside out, and I screamed, striking out in a mindless rage. My knuckles hurt from the blows, but I kept punching his chest and shoulders…until a whisper of a memory stalled me.

  He needed an outlet for his wrath, and I was conveniently handy.

  Gasping, I pulled my shaking hands back, curled them against my chest.

  Oh, God.

  The conversation about Azazel’s past came back in a flash, and a full-body tremble took hold of me. Lucifer had turned his fury on Azazel because the real target hadn’t been available, and so he punished Azazel by proxy.

  And I…I just did the same. It wasn’t Azazel I was angry with. Not really. He didn’t do anything wrong. It wasn’t his fucking fault he had a sadistic psychopath for a grandfather, and this entire goddamn situation wasn’t his fault either. I was mad at Lucifer for his petty family feud that made it impossible to help my father, but because Lucifer wasn’t here…I lashed out at Azazel.

  Just like Lucifer.

  Something twisted painfully in my chest. My breath was little more than a wheezing shudder, and fresh tears sprang to my eyes, burning like the shame now creeping up my throat.

  “I’m sorry,” I rasped, laying a shaking hand on his chest, my fingers trembling against skin I’d been hitting just seconds before. “I’m so sorry.” A sob punched its way out of me, and my voice broke. “I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.” I kept on apologizing, crying, stroking his chest, in a helpless attempt at soothing the hurt I’d caused him.

  He pulled me closer, his energy a raw, biting charge in the air. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, at odds with the intended lightness of his words. “You barely tickled me.”

  I couldn’t even smile at that, the heaviness in my chest snuffing out all amusement. Shaking my head, I stroked him some more with trembling hands, my breath hitching.

  His hot breath fanned the top of my head as he kissed my hair. “You’re nothing like him,” he said in a harsh whisper.

  I sagged against him, deflated, weary with the overload of feeling too much and nothing at all.

  Azazel held me while I wept in silence. It wasn’t until much, much later, when he carried me out of the training ring, that I noticed the pattern of sand-turned-glass on the floor all around where he’d sat cradling me.

  The kind only a fire of immense heat would cause.

  In the week that followed, I moved through the days like a ghost. It was like a fog descended over me, a perpetual veil of numbness that separated me from life. Numbness that I clung to with both hands—because I knew with instinctual clarity that if I let one emotion in, all the others would come rushing in as well, the devastation about the situation with my father most prominent among them. And once I felt that again...I wouldn’t function at all.

  So I went through the motions, there but not, knowing I couldn’t go on like this but unable to flip whatever switch needed flipping in my head to change it. Azazel tried to engage me as much as possible, and I tried to go along… Perceptive as he was, however, he knew my heart wasn’t in it, and when even his usually surefire sensual persuasiveness failed to draw me in, he stopped trying.

  I fully anticipated him to back off completely, given my lack of enthusiasm for basically anything, but to my surprise—numbed by the fog that stubbornly lingered—he still came to me at night. In sleep, the veil I so clung to during the day would become fragile, tearing to reveal the horrors I repressed, and I’d wake from a nightmare of fire and pain and being a helpless witness to my father’s torture—and Azazel would be there, a solid, soothing presence next to me, petting me down from my panic.

  During the day, he made himself increasingly scarce. His withdrawal would have seriously hurt me, if my own apathy weren’t the damn reason for it in the first place, and if my numbness had allowed for any emotion more acute than a slight sting. As it was, the fog shielded me from the roaring pain I knew loomed on the other side of this widening chasm, and all I could do was watch the
distance grow.

  Until that day Hekesha came knocking on my door, frantic in a way I’d never seen her.

  “You need to come,” she pressed out, her face ashen.

  “Where?”

  “Just...come.” She swallowed and added, “Please.”

  Something like worry pierced the fog. It was a rare moment when Hekesha would voluntarily offer such niceties. Usually she’d just glare or grunt.

  “Okay,” I slowly said, following her out into the hallway. “What’s going on?”

  She didn’t answer—a glimpse of her usual Hekesha-ness—just kept walking ahead at a brisk pace until she got to a door. Gingerly, she opened it.

  I sucked in a breath. What greeted me was a level of destruction that shook me even in my numbed state. Splintered pieces of what once was furniture littered the room, half charred, some of it still smoldering, the rugs on the floor partially burned, liberally showered in glistening shards of glass. Ash swirled in the air, along with what looked like sooty scraps of paper floating on a phantom wind, and behind it all, on the wall, the seared remains of shelves.

  I knew this room. I’d been here before, when I explored the mansion. It was some sort of study, with scrolls tucked into antique bookcases, a massive desk, and comfortable chairs to lounge on next to an armoire filled with liquor and drinking glasses.

  All of that old-world, sophisticated coziness was smashed to smithereens, as if a fiery tornado had ravaged the room.

  And in the middle of the destruction, on the one untouched chair, sat Azazel. His head bent, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, he was as still as a statue. Behind his back, his wings rose, the unforgiving black of the feathers seeming to swallow the light spilling in from the hallway.

  “He’s been like this for hours,” Hekesha whispered from behind me. “We don’t know what to do. It’s weirding us out.” She gave me a small shove forward. “Fix him.”