by Jenny McKane
Tentatively, she took a few steps down the stairs and paused, waiting for a monster to jump from the window beside the staircase and gobble her up, or at the very least, for Selah to come at her from some hidden spot in the drapes to scream at her for being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.
The more Sunny thought about it, the more she wondered about Selah’s instructions to stay hidden. Selah was well aware of what Sunny was here to do and what she needed more than anything--access. So why was the demon princess insisting that Sunny stay shut inside her rooms all day and only venture out at dinner time where Azrael and his sons kept uncomfortable watch on her.
She knew the answer to the question before it uttered forth in her mind, but whose side was Selah on? Maybe not even side, but did Selah even want Sunny to succeed whatsoever? She just wasn’t sure anymore and all this time spent alone trying to not drink the poisoned Kool Aid and not get felt up by creepy Vitaly really had Sunny’s warning lights going off in her head.
“Thank goodness for Plaxo,” she muttered to herself over and over with each step that descended down the staircase. “Thank goodness for Plaxo.”
Before meeting the dream demon who’d basically saved her ass more than once, demons fell into two camps with Sunny. There were the demons that needed to be destroyed because they were harming people in the mortal realm, and there were the demons who would eventually need to be destroyed because it was only a matter of time before they crossed over and started wreaking havoc.
Blame her short sightedness on the fact that Michael never really took the time to explain the inner workings of the demon geography or that there were entire species of demons that wanted to live and let live--to exist unharmed in their own realm dabbling in their own specialty while causing zero harm to humanity.
It’d nearly blown her mind when Gideon had insisted that there was an entire population in the demon realm that had never seen a human and would be just fine living out their allotted centuries without ever dealing with one.
Granted, he’d been shackled to Seumat’s bed for a good century or two, thanks to his dickhead of a father, so he also knows plenty of demons who belonged on the end of an obsidian blade, but still. Balance and all that. Gideon had insisted that it existed, and the world was a better, more stable place when it did.
Not that he’d had plans to live out a balanced, stable life or anything. He’d planned to jam a serendibite blade between his father’s ribs and watch the oldest archangel in service die at his feet before, likely, being turned to ash by one of Camael’s underlings. It’d been okay with Gideon. Not so much for Sunny now. She was going to help Gideon get his revenge so that he wasn’t snuffed out in an instant.
All well and good, she reminded herself as she rounded the bottom stairs and found herself outside what sounded like the kitchen.
There were pots and pans banging and clattering and the rise and fall of a crescendo of voices as the kitchen staff buzzed around inside preparing the night’s dinner. The staircase stopped a few feet from the double doors to her right and to Sunny’s left, she saw a long hallway of what she guessed were servant’s rooms. At the very far end of the hallway, she saw the trunk of the damned tree and she even went so far as to stick her tongue out at it.
She really, really hated that tree. And it wasn’t like she had solid proof of anything, either. It simply gave off the worst sort of vibes she’d ever encountered--and hell, Sunny had wandered into a succubus feeding nest in the guise of a college frat party once. Talk about evil--but even that seemed to pale in comparison to what the tree was doing to her internal radar.
There were two small porthole windows on the double doors leading into the kitchen and if Sunny backed up on the step a few steps up, she could just about see inside.
As she had guessed, it was a hive of activity. Demons were chopping. Demons were stirring. Demons were wrapping dough around small chunks of meat. Odd, how these demons could work in such a harried, close proximity and not try to murder one another like the houseguests were doing.
In the very far corner, back behind most of the activity, Sunny spied a large metal vat where two imps were working on a drink. No, Sunny realized the drink. The bottles they dumped in the vat looked suspicious enough, but add to it that the imps weren’t even watching what they were pouring made it clear enough to Sunny that it wasn’t the alcohol that was making the guests act bananas--it was whatever magic rode the alcohol straight into the guest’s system that was doing the crazy making. On one of the corners, Sunny could have sworn she saw---leaves? She narrowed her eyes and leaned up on her tippy toes to get a better look.
“Can I help you, Mistress Layla?”
Birds in the trees, Sunny screamed aloud and nearly fell over as Alder materialized two steps in front of her. It wasn’t her imagination, either. He’d popped out of thin air.
“I’m sorry,” Sunny stammered, faltering under the cold stare coming from the grey, hairless demon with the pointed ears. He was a predator, that much was clear. And if she didn’t think fast, she was going to become the prey.
“I’m hungry,” she blurted out, always relying on her stomach to get her out of trouble. It’d worked a few times back when Gideon had first caught her snooping in his loft, too. “The Princess Selah told me the kitchens were this way.”
Not a lie. Very good, she congratulated herself. Sunny knew there were breeds of demons that could sniff a lie from a mile away. With such a viscous, long nose, it looked like Alder could sniff anything from a mile away--and most certainly a lie.
“Guests are not permitted in the servant’s hallways,” Alder hissed, taking a step up toward her. She didn’t flinch, but oh boy did she want to. “You need to leave. Now.”
She put on her fakest smile.
“Of course, I do,” she said as she moved around the majordomo and onto the carpeted hallway. “Please excuse me and I will find something to eat elsewhere. Perhaps Nesta can have something brought to me.”
Like hell. Nesta would probably poison her food faster than Alder would.
“Don’t let me catch you snooping again,” Alder hissed, a forked tongue darting from his mouth as he pronounced the s. “The master does not take kindly to spies.”
With a forced grin and an equally forced bow, Sunny played her role.
“As he shouldn’t,” she said. “You never know what sort of riff raff will wander into a beautiful place like this.”
Before the reptilian bastard could get another word in, Sunny was gone. Marching down the hallway and praying her racing pulse didn’t give her away.
Chapter Twenty
That night, while Sunny was sleeping, she dreamt that she couldn’t breathe.
As she had been drifting to unconsciousness, she knew that the chances of a bad night of rest were high--her mind was racing and trying its best to process and comprehend another round of violence amongst the demons at the dinner party. More blood. More anger. It’d all been present, again, and it seemed like there was more of it to go around. A veritable rage buffet being offered up, and those idiot demons were practically gorging themselves on it.
But as for her suffocation?
It wasn’t that she witnessed herself, like a television show, stop inhaling and exhaling. It was more like she started feeling her lungs burn from somewhere in a deep, dark void. She panicked then and willed her muscles, wherever they were, to move. To get her up and out of whatever dream state she was in and to get oxygen back inside her body.
It didn’t work completely, however. A rush of breath came back in and immediately the panic subsided, only to return stronger when she wasn’t able to draw another sip of air. Once she felt sure she was passing out, the oxygen returned and her fear subsided. It was a viscous cycle that she found herself in, and it made her certain that she was stuck in some sort of demon nightmare.
Sunny was absolutely certain that she was not going to wake up whenever the demon torturing her was finished. There was no way she’d be abl
e to survive.
And the worst part? Her enemy had her trapped in a space where she had no body, no limbs to use to free herself or to fight back. Whatever was attacking her had found her at her most vulnerable and kept her there.
Silently screaming in her mind, Sunny pushed and pulled against whatever held her trapped, finding it useless and even more taxing. The more upset she became, the stronger the hold it had on her. Despair dipped in along with the fear and when she got really close to passing out, she felt a white-hot rage surge forward. Who was attacking her? When she found out, she would fucking kill them…
The anger was potent and real and unlike any sort of rage she’d felt before. It felt manufactured, actually. Something was encouraging her to be angry. She got the sense that it enjoyed her fear, but the anger was what it really wanted, because instead of feeding her more oxygen to drag out the sick little cycle they’d established, it seemed to squeeze even more comfort out of her. She was in agony and the scream rent from her throat, the end of her valuable oxygen, was inhuman and guttural.
“Lady Hunter,” Plaxo’s voice came from above.
Was it him? Was he torturing her in her dreams?
“I’ll kill you, dream demon,” she swore at nobody, as it was still too dark to see anything, and she couldn’t move. “How dare you!”
She was angry at Plaxo and she couldn’t logically reason why. She didn’t really believe that he was behind this--but her anger, it needed something to tether to and the moment his voice approached, it chose him.
“Be calm, Lady Hunter,” Plaxo’s voice was back. “It is manipulating you. You need to release yourself from its grip.”
“Liar!” she shouted at her ally.
He was a liar. He was trying to hurt her. He wasn’t her friend. He was a betrayer. She would kill him with her obsidian blade if she ever got free from these shackles.
“Be calm!” It was a voice she’d never heard Plaxo use before, but somewhere deep in her subconscious, she knew it was him. It was authoritative and powerful and held no sign of the timid little dream demon she’d gotten to know over the past months. “You are being manipulated and you will stop allowing it.”
Sunny felt a pressure release from her chest and she drew in a long, sweet draw of air. She suddenly became aware of her body, at least in its dream state, and instead of a black nothingness surrounding her, she was downstairs in the foyer. The tree was in the background and Plaxo was in front of her.
“Dream?” she asked, stating the obvious. He nodded.
“Who attacked me?”
“It appears that it was the castle,” Plaxo said. “But the tree is the brain. It’s a living, breathing, feeling type of demon that is some sort of familiar.”
Familiar? Familiars were like pets in the supernatural world.
“That thing is a pet?” She pointed in the direction of the tree in disbelief.
“In a way,” Plaxo said. “Plaxo has been watching the tree over the past few days and reading its energies. The strangest thing is that the tree can dream. It has thoughts and emotions and it dreams.”
A living demon tree? That was freaking terrifying. Sunny’s wide eyes must have been obvious.
“It does its master’s bidding,” Plaxo continued.
“Azrael?” Sunny asked, knowing the answer already.
Again, Plaxo nodded.
“So, this stupid tree, this stupid castle, they’re living beings connected to Azrael? They serve him somehow?”
“That is Plaxo’s theory at the moment,” the dream demon said. “Come. Let Plaxo show Lady Hunter.”
They were in the dream world, which was Plaxo’s domain, so she let him lead the way. With nothing more than a glance around, the scenery shifted. They were still in the foyer, but the time had shifted, and it was suddenly the night of the imp full-contact fighting extravaganza. Sunny watched the tree’s roots flex and roll as the crescendo in the dining hall grew to a fevered pitch. And the tree--it grew bigger for just a moment while the fighting and the dying were at its critical mass.
“Did that thing just grow?”
Plaxo nodded. “It did. The violence and death fed it. Watch.”
The tree writhed again as another scream rent the air. It actually sounded like the gel demon Sunny watched die right before Vitaly got all creepy on her. True to Plaxo’s hypothesis, the tree reacted viscerally, with a branch elongating a few inches right above them.
“Terrifying,” she whispered in awe as she glanced up.
Plaxo nodded glumly.“He’s cheating the system,” Plaxo stated, meaning Azrael. “He reigns in chaos, that’s true, but what he’s doing is amplifying his funnel. He’s gorging himself and using the tree to do it.”
“Again,” Sunny said quietly as she looked at Plaxo, “terrifying.”
“Lady Hunter is now in serious danger,” Plaxo replied. “The tree seems to know you are not like the others and it has targeted you in your sleep.”
Her stomach dropped and she bit her lower lip. She was powerless in her dreams and the tree seemed to have some sort of ability to dream walk.
“I can’t leave yet,” she protested, her mind racing ahead to what Plaxo might be suggesting. “I haven’t come close to finishing our job.”
“Plaxo can help,” he said above her protests. “Plaxo is stronger than the tree, but you are still in danger. Lady Hunter will have to finish sooner than she might have planned at this rate. Plaxo can keep us hidden only for so long and when the tree realizes that you’re human and not of this realm, it will report directly to Azrael. Plaxo doubts anything can save us that point.”
“What can you do?” It wasn’t that Sunny doubted him, she was merely curious. And she might have had just a tiny sliver of doubt.
“Plaxo is stronger than the tree and can alter, at least temporarily, its thoughts and processes where Lady Hunter is concerned,” he tried to explain.
“You can mess with its sanity?”
He nodded. “The tree is not sane, though,” he added. “It is sentient, but it is not a normal being. It has an ancient, arcane demon magic that is twisted and is going to only get more so the longer it is in use.”
“How long has Azrael controlled it?”
“At least 200 years, we estimate,” Plaxo said. “It’s building a store of energy, but if he’d had it for much longer, he’d no longer be so aggressive about feeding it.”
“Feeding it?”
Plaxo continued. “These demon trees used to be found around battlefields,” Plaxo said. “They were fed by the death and pain felt by armies at war. The fighting and the dying made them stronger as a species. Eventually, demon society established a relative peace--a sort of status quo--that all but killed off the demon trees. This one managed to survive, or perhaps was given to Azrael as a gift.”
Sunny eyed the tree again. She knew it was a vision in a dream, and that what she was looking at was really just a construct of a memory, but she still eyed the thing warily.
“And he’s feeding it, and it, in turn, feeds him?”
“Yes,” he said.
“So that silver drink people are knocking back like water, it’s helping everything, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Plaxo said. “Though Plaxo would not have realized it so quickly if Lady Hunter hadn’t mentioned it a few nights ago. That was good observing on her part.”
Indeed, Sunny thought. She was glad she had trusted her instincts when they’d screamed against imbibing, not just because it looked highly toxic, but because everyone was practically drowning in it they were drinking so much.
“It’s not just some sort of spirits, is it? It’s something else,” Sunny said. “I almost thought I saw a bit of magic beneath the surface. And earlier today, when I was looking in the kitchen, I saw where they were preparing it and I saw leaves from the tree on the counter. No wonder. They’re connected.”
“In the worst way,” Plaxo said solemnly.
“The drinks ratchet up the emotions and the
anger, causing fights and demons downstairs basically ripping each other to shreds,” she said, working it out for herself. “The pain and the violence feed the tree, which feeds into Azrael’s power.”
Plaxo was nodding, following her logic and agreeing.
“But what is Azrael building power for? I know your race is on the run and not wanting to be swept up in what he’s doing, but has anyone figured that part out, yet?”
Silence.
“There are many theories, but no concrete answers yet, Lady Hunter.” Plaxo sounded miserable in his reply.
“More time,” she said, muttering to herself. “We just need a little bit more time.”
“We may not have it,” the dream demon argued.
“I get that,” Sunny replied. “But what good is saving Gideon if the entire world is going to collapse on its head if Azrael breaks through the realm and unleashes whatever he’s building on the mortal realm? It would have all been for nothing, anyway.”
The dream demon had a solemn expression.
“Both realms would suffer,” he added. “I promise that. He would likely cast both the demon and the human realm into total chaos and enslave any race or species he came in contact with. He has that much hatred in his heart.”
That gave Sunny pause.
“Why?”
Plaxo hesitated a moment before answering.
“Azrael is not a demon natural born,” he said.
The truth of the statement hit her like a weight in the chest. She’d believed all along that the Archduke of Hell had been born and bred here. That could mean one thing.
“Fallen?” She all but whispered, and the shake of Plaxo’s head caught her breath.
“Worse,” he said. “Cast out of heaven by the creator himself.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Two things began to happen once Plaxo and Sunny began to dig into the secrets surrounding Azrael’s magical demon tree (it was how Sunny preferred to reference it because it sounded silly and less terrifying). The first was that suddenly, there was a lot more of Selah around.
