by Larissa Ione
She slapped him. Hard enough to make his cheek sting. “You bastard.” Raw, burning hatred rolled off her in a wave that scorched his skin. “Is it so easy for you to ignore suffering?”
She really did want to see the worst in him, didn’t she? “What changed, Blaspheme? What kind of message did you get on your phone that made you suddenly hate me so much?”
“Hate you?” Her voice lashed at him, striking as viciously as the demons had done when he was slaving in the mines. “It’s me I hate. I knew I shouldn’t let you in. I knew I shouldn’t allow myself to care about you. But I was a fool, and now I have to live with myself.”
She cared about him? Was that caring now past tense? “I hate to tell you this, angel, but we all have to live with ourselves.”
He didn’t wait for a response. She was too worked up, and he had a situation to handle. Not to mention the drill of a summons in his head that was getting worse the longer he ignored the sender. Satan did not like to be kept waiting, and if Revenant didn’t obey soon, he’d be in for a nice flogging or another organ-ectomy.
Funny how he used to respond to Satan’s demands right away, but now that he had his memory back, screw it. Revenant was going to take tardiness to the limit. Probably not the brightest thing to do, but it seemed that the rebellious streak he’d had while working in Satan’s mines as a child was making a comeback.
Revenant flashed back to Gethel’s place, where the Ramreels were securing the vampire to the rack. “That, boys, is a no-no.”
He flicked his wrist, and the horned demons flew across the room to land in unconscious heaps on the tile floor.
Gethel shoved to her feet, sickly black, scaled wings spread, blue veins snaking across her skin. Her eyes had gone oily, and an aura of power pulsed around her.
“You will not ruin my playtime,” she growled.
He ignored her as he strode over to the barely conscious bloodsucker. He willed the metal cuffs to open and caught the vamp as he slumped over. A blast of power slammed into Revenant’s skull, knocking him into the rack and sending it crashing to the floor.
“You bitch.” He swung around, readying his own power, but Gethel nailed him again, this time hard enough to break his jaw. It healed almost instantly, but now he was pissed.
He dropped the vampire and caught Gethel by the arm. She cursed at him, lashed out with nonstop blasts of power that snapped his bones and crushed his organs. Every step he took was pure agony, but he didn’t slow down, didn’t stop until he had her slammed against the fallen rack and strapped to it.
“What are you doing?” she screamed.
Guards rushed in from every door, armed and ready to take down the threat to their Dark Mother, but when they saw that Revenant was the threat, they skidded to a halt as one unit and stood there, unsure what to do.
“Leave her like that,” Revenant commanded them. “Leave her until morning. If I come back and she’s free, whoever let her go will answer to me.”
Ignoring her curses and shouts, he gathered the vampire and then, with a dozen raunchy curses in a dozen languages, he went to the pantry and grabbed the basket of fucking kittens and flashed to Thanatos’s Greenland castle. Thanatos and his wife, Regan, were seated at their dining room table with their son, Logan, who had mashed peas all over his face. The boy’s pet hellhound, Cujo, made an immediate run at Revenant, fangs bared, drool dripping from gaping jaws that could swallow a lamb whole.
“Cujo, halt!” Than barked, and the steer-sized beast, not yet fully grown, skidded to a stop. But that didn’t mean he suddenly got friendly. No, the mutt crouched, still snarling, still thinking it could kick Revenant’s ass.
Damn, Rev hated those things.
With a glare that promised the hellhound a swat with a rolled newspaper the size of an oil tanker, Rev dumped the vampire onto the floor and set the basket of mewling cats next to him.
Thanatos, the blond braids at his temple swinging, jogged over. “Ewan, shit.” He crouched next to the bloody vamp on the floor. “He missed roll call this morning. We figured he’d stayed out too late and had to hole up at daybreak. Did you do this to him?” He scowled at the jiggling basket. “And what’s up with that?”
“Present for Logan. And no, I didn’t fuck up your vampire, but thanks for thinking the worst of me,” Revenant drawled. “I saved him from Gethel. You’re welcome.”
Figuring he wasn’t going to get a round of applause or anything, Revenant prepared to flash out of there, but before he made it, Thanatos introduced Revenant’s spine to the wall and was in his face, teeth bared as fully as the hellhound’s.
“Where is she?” he snarled. “You had better tell me she’s dead.”
“She’s alive and kicking and due to give birth any moment,” Revenant said, enjoying the fury that built in Thanatos’s expression with every word. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Thanatos… he just didn’t like being attacked for no fucking reason.
“You piece of shit.” Thanatos gripped Revenant’s jacket lapels and slammed him against the wall again. “She tried to murder my son. And you can casually talk about her like she’s a happy housewife with a pregnancy glow?”
It was really tempting to lay the Horseman out, but the sight of Regan, standing in the dining room with Logan held protectively close to her chest, made something tumble inside his own chest. How many times had his mother held him like that when demons opened the door to the cell? How many times had she endured watching her son ripped away from her so either he or she could be beaten?
So as much as he’d like to shred Thanatos for being a dick, he wasn’t going to do it in front of a mother and her child. Instead, he used a tiny thread of his power to throw the Horseman backward, right into the stupid hellhound. The mutt yelped, and Thanatos hit the ground, only to pop back to his feet, fully armed and armored.
“Don’t do it, Horseman,” Revenant warned. “I have a raging Satanic headache and little patience. And keep in mind that I didn’t have to bring back your vampire.”
“What, you want an award for doing the right thing?” Thanatos signaled for Cujo to stop inching toward Revenant. “You want kudos? Bring me Gethel.”
“No can do.”
Thanatos sheathed his sword but remained armored. “You know, when we found out you were our uncle, that you’re an angel like our father, we hoped you’d at least try to become part of the family. But you don’t know what family is, do you?” Thanatos’s diatribe shouldn’t have bothered Revenant, but like earlier, when Blaspheme laid into him, the words cut deep, because no, he didn’t know what a family was. And he didn’t realize until this moment that he wanted to know. “Family doesn’t protect the monster under the bed. Only monsters protect other monsters.” He threw his hand out at the door. “Get out, Uncle. Go to hell where you belong.”
Revenant got out, but as he dematerialized, he realized Thanatos was right. He did belong in hell, and he always had.
Twenty-Five
Despite a crazy childhood that involved a lot of moves and name changes, Blaspheme had always felt like she was on the right side of luck. But lately, it seemed as if her luck had run out, and maybe it was a coincidence, but it all seemed to have started the moment Revenant came into her life.
She’d known better, but he’d wormed his way past her defenses with his oddball charm and heart-wrenching vulnerability when he told her about his childhood. And then he’d gone and saved a patient she’d nearly killed, earning her eternal gratitude.
Then it turned out that Revenant was exactly who she’d thought he was from the beginning.
A cold killer with no conscience.
Gods, what an idiot she’d been. And really, she had no one to blame but herself. She couldn’t even blame Revenant. He was a meat-eating shark, like he’d said, and she’d expected him to become a vegetarian. Tiger sharks couldn’t change their stripes, and neither could a Shadow Angel.
Of course, vyrm could change their stripes, couldn’t they? All they needed was a bl
ood sacrifice and a few magical chants. Maybe she should have done the ritual her mother wanted her to do. If she had, she’d have mustered up the stones to destroy Lucifer today. Instead, her vyrm was showing, her angel half rising like a phoenix from the ashes of her False Angel aura to give her a conscience.
As a result, she was now standing in Underworld General’s staff lounge telling Eidolon that she’d failed to inject the solarum into Lucifer. Reaver was there, too, listening intently to her every word.
It didn’t matter that no one was angry; their disappointment was even worse.
“I tried,” she said. “I just… couldn’t.”
She couldn’t even lay the blame for her failure on Revenant, no matter how much she wanted to. She’d hesitated from the beginning, and ultimately, it was her fault that Gethel was going to give birth to the evilest of evils.
“We can try again,” Eidolon said. “Reaver can get another dose of solarum —”
“No,” he said roughly, “I can’t. It took hundreds of years to distill just that amount. It was all we had.” He cursed. “There’s got to be another way. Harvester is getting sicker, and I can’t sit by and let it happen.”
“Harvester?” Blas frowned. “What does she have to do with this?”
Eidolon shoved a paper cup under the coffee machine nozzle and mashed a button with his thumb. “Lucifer is drawing energy from his siblings. It’s weakening her. I paid her a house call earlier today… she lost twenty pounds overnight.”
Reaver clenched his fists, and the blue of his eyes turned stormy, like lightning striking the ocean’s surface. “Wraith located two of Satan’s sons and one daughter, and they’re all wasting away. Another reportedly died this morning.”
Oh… oh, gods. If Harvester died, it would be Blaspheme’s fault. Harvester’s, and all fallen angel deaths, would sit squarely on her shoulders, and why? Because she’d been too self-righteous to put an end to a great evil, simply because it couldn’t yet defend itself?
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Lucifer had nearly crushed her skull when she tried to listen to his heartbeat, so what if she had managed to inject him? Would he have been able to lash out? To kill her, even?
No matter what, she should have tried.
“I’m so sorry, Reaver. I didn’t —”
He silenced her with a gesture. “We don’t have time for regrets. We need action. I’m going to scour Sheoul from top to bottom to find Gethel, and I don’t care if I have to battle Satan himself to do it.”
“Reaver, think about —” Eidolon broke off as Reaver vanished. “Son of a bitch. That maniac is going to get himself killed.” He swiped his cup of coffee off the machine platform. “Did you at least get a sample of amniotic fluid?” Wordlessly, she handed him the syringe. “Good. I’ll get an injection prepared for your mother. Can you get her in here this afternoon? I heard she sort of checked herself out.”
“I’ll send her a text right now.”
The door burst open, and Bane stuck his blond head inside the room. “Blas, do you have a minute?”
At Eidolon’s go-ahead nod, she slipped out into the hall with the other Seminus demon. Last night she’d asked him for a favor, and she hoped he was here to tell her he’d done what she’d asked. If so, she owed him ten weekends off.
“Tell me you got the book,” she said, resisting the temptation to cross her fingers like a superstitious twit.
He grinned. “Yep. Come on.”
She followed the towering Sem to the hospital’s Harrowgate. The wall lit up with multicolored map outlines, which he tapped until the door opened into a featureless, dark, cavernous area.
“Um… I thought you said you had it.”
He shrugged, his thick shoulders rolling beneath his blue scrub top. “My moms have it. They wouldn’t give it to me until they met you.” A sheepish grin added a boyish cast to his handsome face. As incubi, all Seminus demons were impossibly hot, but somehow Bane and his brothers took hot to a scorching new level. “Okay, that’s a lie. You have to get it from them.” He patted her on the back as they stepped out of the gate. “Good luck.”
“Wait… your moms?” Despite the lack of light fixtures, a hazy luminosity from above allowed her to see Bane… but nothing else. “As in, more than one?”
He nodded. “With very few exceptions, Pruosi demons are born female, and the sisters stay together for life. They mate at the same time with the same male, and the resulting young are taken care of by all the females. None of my brothers or I know which female gave birth to us. They’re all our moms.”
Huh. She’d known that Pruosi, a species of necromancer succubi, were generally born female and purebred no matter what species of male had sired them, but she hadn’t known they lived in sister-communities.
Blas looked him up and down. “I would love to study the way Pruosi and Seminus DNA battle it out to determine the resulting offspring’s species. Did your mothers know that Seminus demons are always born purebred male when they bred with your father?”
“They knew.” He shrugged. “Change of pace to have sons, I guess.” He gestured to a new soft green glow emanating from an opening in the dark wall ahead. “They’re in there. I’ll wait here. Oh, and Blas? No matter what you do, don’t lie to them.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said.
His hand, covered in the same type of glyphs that every Seminus demon bore, snapped out to catch her wrist in a firm grip.
“I mean it,” he said, his voice dripping with warning. “They don’t respond well to lies, and I promise you, they’ll know. These are demons who work in black magic and death. They’re a motherfucking four-point-five on the Ufelskala scale. Don’t screw with them.”
She swallowed dryly and pulled away. “Understood.”
Blas rubbed the scar on her wrist as she walked through the doorway. Beyond it, in a featureless dark room that didn’t even seem to have walls, ten females who could have passed as albino humans sat in a circle, their bodies wrapped in sheer fabric that hid precisely nothing. In the center of the Pruosi circle, black candles formed another circle around a wooden bowl that held what appeared to be blood.
“Blaspheme,” they all intoned at once, and her hair stood on end. So very creepy. “What do you seek?”
“I seek a necromancy spellbook.”
The females had yet to look at her. “Why?”
No matter what you do, don’t lie to them. “I’m looking for a spell to disguise myself.” Not a lie, but not very detailed, either.
“For what purpose?”
Why did they keep speaking in unison? “To hide from people who want to kill me.”
“Who wants to kill you?”
“I don’t know.” Surely that didn’t count as a lie. It wasn’t as if she knew specifics.
The females leaned into their circle, and a buzz of whispers vibrated the air like a million angry bees. Shit. Had Blas screwed up?
She waited, sweating bullets and fighting stomach cramps. Finally, just as she started to think she couldn’t take the suspense anymore, they straightened again. And still they didn’t meet her gaze.
“The book you seek is behind you,” they droned. “But we do suggest you hurry to use it.”
Hurry? Did they need it back right away? “Of course,” she breathed. “And thank you. Thank you so much.”
“We do this not out of the goodness of our hearts, healer. We do it for payment.”
Oh. Of course. “I don’t have much money, but I can borrow some, or I can offer services —”
“Not payment from you.” Every head came up or swiveled completely around, and glowing red eyes focused on her like lasers. “Payment from those who hunt vyrm.” They smiled, their pale lips stretching gruesomely over sharp, stained teeth, and Blaspheme’s heart stuttered. “So hurry, healer. Hurry.”
Terror made Blaspheme clumsy as she wheeled around, grabbed the tattered book off a wooden stand she knew hadn’t been there before, and darted to the Harrowgate
, where Bane was waiting.
“You could have told me they wanted payment,” she yelled as she practically dove inside the gate.
“I thought you knew.” Joining her, he hit the Underworld General symbol with a thump of his fist. “They’re Pruosi. They don’t do anything for free. Hell, they expect their own children to pay them back for being born.”
In the darkness lit only by the brightness of the maps inside the Harrowgate, she stared at the demon. Seminus demons were considered purebred, but they always inherited gifts and abilities unique to their mothers’ species. Blaspheme hadn’t really considered what would happen if a Sem had been born to a truly malevolent mother.
“So how does your Pruosi breeding affect you?”
He shrugged. “My brothers and I can all reanimate corpses.”
Ew. “You guys must be the life of the party on Halloween.”
“I remember this one time —” The temperature inside the small space plummeted, and Bane’s skin flushed white as his eyes went red, just like all the females in the Pruosi circle. “I can see death coming,” he said, his deep voice utterly devoid of tone. “It’s all around you, Blaspheme. It’s coming, and it can’t be stopped.”
Revenant’s head was pounding by the time he reached Satan’s residence, only for Revenant to be told that the Dark Lord was waiting for him in the dungeon.
That couldn’t be good.
Revenant trudged down the claustrophobic circular stone staircase, his flesh crawling as the sights, smells, and sounds of his childhood came back to him. Inside, his organs jangled, as if they remembered as well and didn’t want to be spilled all over the floor.
Again.
His boot hit the filthy dungeon floor with a thud that echoed through the massive torture chamber. It was apparently a slow day today, with none of the apparatuses in use and only two demons hanging from chains on the far wall. Two halls broke off from the main chamber, leading to what had been his childhood recreational area: cell blocks, kitchens, and rooms set aside for storage, equipment repair, and specialty torture.
