Hell Hath No Vengeance (Vengeance Demons Book 5)

by Louisa Lo

  “By visiting you mean you were hitting her up for a booty call in the middle of the night.” A muscle jumped on Gregory’s face. I promised myself I would drag the story out of him one of these days.

  But not today.

  “Such crass language.” Minister Sumpsi tsked. “Anyway, I was visiting your mother and found her in the same state as how Miss Aequitas had described her roommate here.”

  “What? Mom is in trouble?” Gregory yelled. With a quick wave of his hand, he opened a cross-dimensional portal and looked ready to dive in headfirst. But he aborted at the last minute, letting the portal fade away as he grabbed my shoulders instead. “Megan, tell me exactly what state your roommate is in. I need to know what I’ll be walking into.”

  “As…as I said, she’s unconscious.” I swallowed. Boy, Gregory’s face was a picture of thunderclouds. Even though I knew his anger wasn’t directed at me, being in such close proximity to it, I still shivered. Out of all the times I’d faced sticky situations with him in business, I’d never seen him like this. Professionally annoyed and outraged, yes, but not this deep-in-the-gut anger. This was personal. “Her mind is hijacked, with good memories being turned into bad ones. There was a voice there, telling me I have to give Boyce Armstrong in exchange for Rosemary.”

  “Boyce Armstrong, our target.” Gregory’s jaw formed a grim line.

  “Yep.” And there it was, the consequence of working with Lucifer. If I didn’t have doubts about the arrangement before, I sure did now. The generous pay dirt we took home held hidden risks far beyond a simple, cut-and-dry client/freelancer relationship.

  Gregory forced a calming breath into his lungs, then he waved his hand and got ready to teleport again.

  “Don’t bother going to her,” Minister Sumpsi spoke at the last minute. “I’ve brought her here.”

  The asshole sure knew how to hold back information.

  Minister Sumpsi took a green bubble the size of a marble out of his suit pocket and threw it toward my living room sofa. Despite the momentum, the bubble moved away from his hand slowly, enlarging exponentially until, by the time it reached the sofa, it was as big as the furniture itself. Being blown up to this size, I could see that the bubble’s thick texture and relative lack of transparency was similar to the type of air pockets that humans like to produce when they chewed bubble gum.

  Then the bubble burst, revealing a woman. She dropped onto the sofa none too gently, her neck bent in an awkward way that would most likely give her the crick of a lifetime. She appeared to be in deep sleep, her body limp and relaxed.

  “Mom!” Gregory ran to the woman and tenderly rolled her head into a more comfortable position. The look he gave his father promised retribution and pain. “How dare you transport her like a piece of cargo!”

  Minister Sumpsi shrugged. “She isn’t hurt by it whatsoever.”

  Yeah, but that wasn’t how one should treat even someone they’d called just for booty call, let alone the mother of their child. Bastard. Minister of Vengeance Ethics, my butt.

  I narrowed my eyes and crossed my arms, looking at the old man. He had come here, to my own home, to see me. I bet he didn’t even know Gregory was going to be here. “So let me guess. You found your would-be lover of the night unconscious upon your arrival. You went into her mind, found the message left there, and figured this is related to your son’s mercenary business. Instead of solving it yourself or having the guts to go to Gregory, you came to my doorstep to dump this onto me so I’ll go tell him.”

  “I’m here to show you the consequences of your new life, you insolent child!” Minister Sumpsi huffed. “You keep working with the mercenaries, and you’re bound to drag those you love into your mess. I’m trying to make you take responsibility for the path you’ve chosen.”

  “To what end, so that I’ll realize what a better alternative it is to help the Council destroy the world? After what you’ve done to my grandmother? Seriously?” I snorted.

  Minister Sumpsi’s usually civilized face twisted into a sneer. “You can delude yourself into thinking that you’re free of us, young lady, but you’re a vengeance demon, and you are ours. You better hope you never get injured from your new job. I’ll make sure that every hospital triage desk from this plane and beyond knows to treat you last.”

  With that parting shot, he teleported away.

  I raised the safeguard while Gregory continued stroking his mother’s hair. In the faint early morning rays I could tell that she was a woman in her forties, clad in a nightdress and a white bathrobe. I was glad of the presence of the bathrobe, because from the hot-red lace trim peeking out of it and the generous showing of legs, I got a feeling the nightdress would match the “booty call” nature of the foiled visit a little too well. Not exactly the kind of things I wanted to see from the parent of my maybe soul mate.

  I could see the resemblance between mother and child. Her curly chestnut hair was the same shade as Gregory’s, and they shared the same chiseled cheekbones. Despite the lines on her face that betrayed a not-so-kind life, she was still an attractive woman. Her vengeance power, however, was nowhere near her son’s, let alone Minister Sumpsi’s. Her signature was weak and all over the place, though I had no idea if that was due to the kidnapping of her mind, since I’d never met her at her normal state to establish a baseline. Her open, unfocused eyes were so like Rosemary’s that I wanted to rush upstairs to check on my roommate right this moment.

  “Give me every detail on what happened with Rosemary,” Gregory said softly, his eyes not leaving his mother’s face.

  I told him.

  “So this lover of Boyce Armstrong’s took someone from each of our lives as hostages in exchange for him.” Gregory’s eyes glinted like dark chips of ice on a cold January highway.

  I shivered. Gregory’s mother was a supernatural and it didn’t stop whatever it was enthralling her from taking hold. What chance did Rosemary have to get out of this?

  As if sensing my train of thoughts, Gregory said softly, “My mother is weaker than most supernaturals. Her entrapment doesn’t mean your roommate is without hope.”

  He didn’t elaborate, so I concentrated on the matter at hand. The associates of hardened criminals were usually also, well, hardened criminals. Add that with a little bit of crazy, obsessive love, and it was a recipe for disaster. Judging from the almost simultaneous attacks on Rosemary and Gregory’s mother, this one seemed to have the ability to be in two places at the same time.

  “What do we do?” I asked, squeezing my hands together until they hurt. “You heard the minister. I doubt taking them to the hospital would be the best choice right now, even if Rosemary was a supernatural.”

  “I agree.” Gregory nodded. “We have to see if we can free them ourselves. Your roommate and my mother are either ejected from their minds or being trapped inside them. Either way, the answer could be in there as well.”

  I had to admit, this “kidnapping” actually had a twisted kind of brilliance, as the women’s bodies were still right here with us. If our loved ones were physically missing, there were locator spells we could employ to find them. The working of the mind, on the contrary, was still very much a mystery, even for supernaturals.

  Sassy hopped downstairs and stared at Gregory. He leaned down and let her sniff his fingers. She must've decided that he was all right, because she wound around his legs, then turned to me and meowed, tilting her head toward the stairs as if urging me to get back to Rosemary.

  “My shade is attached to Rosemary,” I explained to Gregory as I started following Sassy toward the stairs.

  Gregory stayed rooted, frowning at Sassy with the most peculiar expression. “The invader was able to launch an assault on your roommate, in your house, while your shade was here?”

  “Looks like it.” I shrugged.

  “But you know what that means, don’t you?” He blew out a breath heavily. “It means that the invader herself must also be a shade. It takes a familiar to get past a creature that�
�s born into the shadow.”

  He closed his eyes and ran his palm over his forehead, his eyebrows creased deeply.

  I stopped in my tracks, icy fingers caressing my stomach. Even in the worst of work situations—and there had been a hairy moment or two—Gregory had never seemed upset or overwhelmed by the tasks ahead. Yet here he was, coming as close to being unnerved as I’d seen him.

  I decided the best way to address it was to treat it like any other case. So I used my most business-like tone and said briskly, “I assume that would make our job a little bit harder.”

  Gregory picked up his mother to follow me, so I started moving again. It was probably a good idea to have his mom and Rosemary close to each other for whatever it was we were supposed to do to help them anyway. “That’s an understatement. How much do you know about shades in general?” he asked.

  “No more than what common sense dictates. They say shades make the most loyal pets if you get them real young. They choose you, you don’t choose them. Once they imprint on you, it’s for life, and they’ll look out for you always.”

  “But you see, not all shades would choose the role of loyal pets and de-facto bodyguards.” Gregory shook his head as he gingerly walked up the stairs while making sure his mother’s dangling feet weren’t hitting anything. “There is a darker type that could take on corporeal form if they wish, that likes to hide inside the minds of others like a parasite, a menacing presence in the backdrop of memories. They feed on guilt and pain.”

  “Is that why that voice spoke to me through Rosemary’s memory?” I gestured Gregory to my bedroom, and he placed his mom on my mattress. There wasn’t any space to put his mom in Rosemary’s room, unless you counted a couple of folding chairs.

  Boy, was I glad I splurged a bit and did that magical quick clean on my room. On the other hand, my reversion spell was only able to turn my bedroom back to the way it was before the first attack—yes, I was rapidly exceeding the attack quota de jour—and the original state of my room wasn’t exactly tidy to begin with. Maybe it would’ve been better if I never cleaned up the room. Then my own mess would’ve been totally hidden by the bigger mess.

  “That memory of Rosemary’s—was it a happy one?” Gregory asked as he made minor adjustments to make his mother’s position more comfortable.

  “It was supposed to be, until it turned all dark and gloomy for no apparent reason.”

  “That would be the shade’s doing.” Gregory appeared thoughtful. “She was converting a happy memory into a horrible one that needed to be repressed.”

  “How does it work?” I asked, intrigued despite the current situation.

  “A real repressed memory, created from a traumatic event, hides in the shadow of the mind and festers like an untreated wound. A fake one mimics that, making the conscious mind shy away from dealing with it because it feels painful and filled with shame. When I said this type of shade feed on guilt and pain, I mean they often cultivated the emotions themselves by artificially nurturing the environment necessary for it.”

  “That’s why she said ‘I could turn good dreams into bad dreams, and bad dreams into nightmares.’” I muttered.

  “Exactly. We have to get my mom and Rosemary out before the shade starts corrupting every happy memory they ever had. Permanently.”

  “So where do we begin?” I asked. We never discussed giving into the kidnapper’s demand and actually getting Boyce for the proposed exchange. It wasn’t happening and the reason was simple—going up against Lucifer would be suicidal. And then we die, go to Hell, and get slaughtered all over again. The big circle of death. No thank you.

  “We have to enter the infected memories and decontaminate them one by one. Only then can we eject the shade once and for all. But Megan—” He swallowed. Talk about guilt—there was a load of it that was evident on Gregory’s face right now, and it instantly put me on guard. “Do you mind if we work on Rosemary first?”

  “Why?” I stared at him, and he looked away for a second before facing me again. He straightened his spine.

  “I could lie and say that it’s because your roommate is human, and therefore more vulnerable to the shade’s attack and has less time before it’s too late. But the truth is, my mother is the more vulnerable one. The kind of extraction we’re talking about is tricky, and I dare not risk her until I know what we’re dealing with. For all we know, entering and exiting a damaged memory in itself could destroy it, or even hurt the very spirit of the person altogether.”

  “But it’s okay to use Rosemary as a guinea pig?” I asked angrily. Growing up bullied and stigmatized, I didn’t have friends by the bucket. Rosemary might not be blood, and I could never be fully honest with the mortal, but she still means a lot to me. How dare Gregory place her at risk over his mother when my human roommate was so obviously the more exposed of the two?

  Was everything I came to believe Gregory to be nothing but a lie? Was my initial assessment of him as a scumbag right, after all? Was he that willing to throw what was mine under the bus when his was threatened? Was this retaliation for what almost happened to Candy under my watch?

  Might as well that nothing came out of that kiss, then.

  Bad enough that thanks to my need to defeat the Council, I got into the mercenary line of work, became involved in Lucifer’s business, and brought fear and devastation to Rosemary’s doorstep, damn if I was going to put her last because I was too busy playing maybe-soul-mate with Gregory.

  “Trust me, your roommate is far stronger than my mother,” Gregory countered.

  “Bullshit,” I bit out, “your mother is a freakin’ supernatural. Rosemary is only human.”

  “Believe me, your roommate is the tougher one,” Gregory said.

  “Why?”

  He locked his jaws mulishly.

  “Oh, come on, don’t go silent on me now.” He was asking me to trust him. A lot. He better have a darn good explanation.

  “Because even though I’d never get to know your roommate well, I heard enough about her through you to get a good idea of who she is. She’s mentally strong,” he ground out.

  “How did you come to that particular conclusion?” I crossed my arms.

  “You told me the story about that abandoned nest of eggs under her window and how she believes they would still hatch. She’s positive enough to never give up hope on those long-calcified eggs, and she allows herself to be happy again even after she suffers a disappointment. She’s tough.” The corners of Gregory’s mouth turned down, as if he would rather eat nails than to say his next words. “Unlike my mother.”

  “Because she’s weak enough to take a booty call from the man who walked out on her and her child?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted it—or at the very least, I regretted using the word booty. Gregory had never talked about his mother other than in a superficial way since I’d known him, and me being insensitive about it when he started doing so wasn’t how I’d imagined it.

  “Okay, that was out of line,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—”

  Gregory held up a hand, “No, despite the crude way you put it, you were right. My mother never stopped mooning over my biological father. Never allowed herself to love someone else. Never mind that he’d never paid her a single dime of child support. Never mind that he’d moved on and married someone else, she has no pride and no dignity where he’s concerned. There’s a reason why the shade targeted whom she targeted—she took the people she considered to be the weakest links in our lives. Your roommate is human, and by the natural design of her race she’s weaker, while my mother had allowed an unworthy man to ruin her life. An emotional vulnerability, especially a willful one, is always more severe than a physical shortcoming.”

  Oh crap, it did sound like Gregory’s mother was the one who was more at risk once he put it that way.

  In a way, it would’ve been easier if Gregory had lied about why we should try to help Rosemary first. Instead, his honesty was forcing me to be an active participant in
the decision to choose the safety of his mother over my roommate. With him being upfront about everything, I couldn’t even claim the bliss of ignorance.

  Damn him.

  Chapter Six

  Always Have Paris

  Gregory and I each stood on one side of Rosemary, holding her hands.

  “The actual viewing of memory is no different than the regular procedure,” Gregory explained. “But rather than experiencing the recollection after it is downloaded and reformatted onto a flash drive, we’ll be seeing it at its source. Since you’re already familiar with the infected memory, I’ll rely on you to lead the way.”

  Lead the way. Right. As if a single wrong move wouldn’t have a negative impact on Rosemary’s psyche, maybe even her life. I didn’t want the responsibility. But I couldn’t back down, either.

  Then something occurred to me.

  “Wait, if we’re both going in, who’s going to be our anchor?” I asked. Even for regular memory viewing, there was always someone doing the anchoring, staying behind in the physical world to make sure that the viewer didn’t get lost in the memories. I would assume that would be even more important, given what was awaiting us inside Rosemary’s mind.

  Stuck forever wandering in my roommate’s corrupted memories sounded like a punishment worse than death.

  Sassy settled herself right at the foot of the bed and meowed. “Meeee yyyelp!”

  I could’ve sworn it sounded like: “Me help!”

  Gregory reached over and scratched Sassy at the back of her ear, “I figured you would want to help, feline warrior.”

  I rolled my eyes. Leave it to my cat to be chummy with Gregory when I was still trying to figure it all out with him. Our fight earlier might’ve been put on the back burner for now, but it remained unresolved. It was surprising to see him drawing back his hand with all five fingers intact. Sassy usually wasn’t into being patted. I guess that little feline warrior compliment went a long way. I sighed and closed my eyes, willing myself to visualize the memory where the shade had given me the warning.